His father was a teacher world health organization encouraged his boy to underst&, and Rex experienced see the entire Bible twice by the instance he was Four years old. At a age of Baker's dozen he was a state spelling-bee champion. He served deuce years in the U.S. Navy (as a yeoman on President Teddy Roosevelt's official yacht) and then spent about four years working at about thirty different jobs (in six states), including cigar store clerk, while he sold poems, stories, and articles to various magazines.

It was non his writing however his invention of the school banking industry within astir 1916 that gave him enough money to travel around Europe extensively. (Just about 400 U.S. schools adopted his models for keeping track of the money school youngsters redeemed inside accounts at school, & he was paid royalties.) Around Paris in 1929 he wrote his first book, How Like a God. Fallowing writing trey additional successful novels, he returned to the U.S. & began writing detective stories. A foremost of these was Fer-de-Lance, which introduced Nero Wolfe and his side-kick Archie Goodwin. That novel was number one promulgated as a serial in The Saturday Evening Post and then as a book in 1934. Stout continued writing a Wolfe series until shortly prior to his demise around 1975, yielding the aggregate of roughly 33 novels & 39 collected novelette or even short stories.

Nero Wolfe has been featured in film adaptations from either the Thirties through a Eighties & was recently the subject of a television series on the A&E Network. An organization of Stout & Wolfe aficionados, A Wolfe Case, holds cases for readers of a series including bimonthly book discussions & an annual Assembly & Banquet inside Future York, & publishes the biennial "Gazette."

Around 1937, Stout created Dol Bonner, who could use been the number 1 female personal detective to star around a novel. She would reappear inside many Wolfe books.