Rex Ellingwood Beach was an American novelist, playwright, and businessman.
Background
Rex Beach was born on September 1, 1877, in Atwood, Antrim County, Michigan. Christened Rex Ellingwood Beach, he was the third of the three sons of Henry Walter Beach and Eva Eunice (Canfield) Beach, who came to Michigan from New York state. His father was a diligent, modestly successful farmer; his mother, who had been a schoolteacher, was well educated and wrote poetry. Their fruit farm near Lake Michigan was insufficiently productive, and when Beach was nine his parents sailed to Florida with neighbors on a schooner and settled on a farm near Tampa.
Education
Beach went to the preparatory department of Rollins College, Winter Park, when he was fifteen. He was at Rollins four years, working in a laundry for his tuition. In 1896 he left, without graduating, to study law at the Chicago College of Law, joining his two older brothers, who were lawyers there. However, lured by the Klondike gold rush in 1897, he abandoned law and spent much of the next five years prospecting and mining in Alaska without remarkable success.
Career
While in Alaska, Beach read a collection of short stories by Jack London, and was awakened to the possibilities of turning his own experiences to fictional account. He sold his first story, "The Mule Driver and the Garrulous Mute, " to McClure's Magazine for $50 and became a frequent contributor. His first book, Pardners (1905), was a collection of ten stories of life in Alaska and the West. His next, a novel, The Spoilers (1906), became a best seller (more than 700, 000 copies). It was a story about Alaskan prospectors cheated of valuable claims by chicanery. "I wrote it, " Beach said, "as an exposure of corrupt judges and lawyers. " His second novel, The Barrier (1907), also about Alaska, was superior to the first in technique and sold nearly as well. Beach continued to write popular "redblooded" Alaskan novels - The Silver Horde (1909), a tale of the salmon fisheries, and The Net (1912).
However, he turned to other subjects and backgrounds - the Canal Zone, for instance, in The Ne'er-do-Well (1911), and New York City in The Auction Block (1914). Beach, like James Oliver Curwood and Stewart Edward White (the three were all born in Michigan; all came to prominence early in the century, and were on best-seller lists into the 1920's), used his material romantically and sentimentally to illustrate the virtues of courage, hard work, and personal integrity. His stories were infused with authentic knowledge of the scenes described and a love for outdoor life. By 1926, Beach's publisher could advertise that more than 3, 000, 000 copies of his books had been sold.
Beach was the first American author to insert a clause about movie rights in his contracts, securing for himself a footnote in film history and a great deal of additional revenue. By refusing to sell the novel outright, he profited each time The Spoilers was filmed (with William Farnum in 1914, Milton Sills in 1922, Gary Cooper in 1930, and John Wayne in 1942). Fourteen of his novels and sixteen of his original scenarios were made into motion pictures. In 1948, he sold the film rights to his last novel, Woman in Ambush (1951) - not quite completed at the time of his death - for $100, 000, the highest price paid by Hollywood producers up to that time for an unpublished manuscript.
After making one fortune from novels and motion pictures, Beach went on in his later years to make another from flower and vegetable growing - he grossed $200, 000 in one season from the sale of bulbs alone. Eventually he sold this farm to his employees and began raising cattle. He once owned 7, 000 acres near Sebring and 2, 000 acres near Avon Park. He shrewdly followed the advice of specialists on farming methods and soil problems. Though he continued to write fiction on a reduced scale, he also wrote about soil conservation, human and animal nutrition, and other subjects that concerned him.
Beach’s interest in Alaska never waned and he proposed government-financed projects for American youth to develop the territory. In his later years Beach suffered acutely from throat cancer and from failing eyesight. He endured four eye operations, and for two years breathed through a tube inserted in his throat, with nerve-block surgery to relieve pain. Finally, at age seventy-two, he committed suicide at his home in Sebring. His body was cremated; his ashes and those of his wife (who had died on April 15, 1947) were buried on the campus of Rollins College.
Quotations:
"It has always been my failing, " Beach once wrote, "to quit the thing I am doing before it is well or completely done and try something new. "
"My early novels were Alaskan, and they stamped me with a brand as distinctive as the label on a sardine can, " Beach said.
Membership
Rex Beach was the first president of the Rollins College Alumni Association.
Personality
Rex Beach had a humorous temper and was warmly regarded by his neighbors and farm employees.
Quotes from others about the person
Beach was described by a friend, Cosmo Hamilton, as "a man standing six-feet-one in his socks, with a back as broad as a door, a hand like a leg of mutton, a deep, vibrating voice, soft blue eyes with a twinkle. "
Interests
Sport & Clubs
An athlete and sportsman, Beach played football for the Chicago Athletic Association and participated as a swimmer in the Olympic Games at St. Louis, Missouri, in 1904.
Connections
In 1907 in New York City Rex Beach married Edith Greta Crater, an actress and daughter of George E. Crater, a Denver, Colorado, businessman and former superintendent of the Denver Mint. They had met in Nome, where she owned and operated a small hotel. The marriage was childless.