Beach, Rex (1877-1949)

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Beach, Rex (1877-1949)

"Big hairy stories about big hairy men" is how one critic described the work of one of the early twentieth century's most prolific and successful popular writers, Rex Beach. He developed a devoted following among the reading public which remained loyal to his works into the mid-1930s. In addition, he led the way for later authors to reap greater profits by exploiting other media outlets for their works, thus defining what the twentieth-century author of popular literature became by mid-century—an independent entrepreneur.

Rex Ellingwood Beach was born in Atwater, Michigan, in 1877. At age twelve his family packed their belongings and sailed by raft down the Mississippi and across the Gulf of Mexico to Florida, where they took up residence on homesteaded land. Beach attended Rollins College at Winter Park but left shortly before graduation to move to Chicago. He read law in an older brother's law office and took one or two law courses, but he never finished a law program. Afflicted with gold fever after reading of the vast gold discoveries in the far north, Beach headed for Alaska in 1897 to seek his fortune. He found little gold. Instead he discovered wealth of a different kind, a mine of stories and colorful characters and situations that he developed into best selling popular literature.

In the summer of 1900, Beach witnessed a bold attempt by North Dakota political boss Alexander McKenzie to steal gold from the placer mines at Nome, Alaska. When the scheme failed, McKenzie and his cronies were arrested. Beach transformed the events into a series of muckraking articles, "The Looting of Alaska," for Apple-ton's Century magazine in 1905. From this series came his first novel, The Spoilers. He added some fictional characters to the events at Nome, and the resulting novel, published in 1905, made the bestseller list in 1906. Later that year he transformed the novel into a play, which ran for two-week runs in Chicago and New York before it was sent out on the road for several years. In 1914 Beach contracted with the Selig Corporation to release the film version of The Spoilers for 25 percent of the gross profits, a unique arrangement for its time. On four subsequent occasions, in 1923, 1930, 1942, and 1955, Beach or his estate leased the rights to The Spoilers to film companies for the same financial arrangement. Beach published a total of twenty novels and seventy short stories and novelettes. He authorized thirty-two film adaptations of his work. In addition to The Spoilers, The Barrier was filmed three times; five of his novels were filmed twice; and fourteeen of his novels and stories were each filmed once.

Writing in the school of realism, his novels and stories were works of romantic, frontier adventure aimed at young men. Plots involved ordinary hard-working citizens forced to confront the forces of nature and corruption. They overcame their adversaries by means of violence, loyalty to the cause and to each other, and heroic action. Rarely did these citizens rely on government agencies for assistance, in keeping with Beach's philosophy of rugged individualism.

From 1911 to 1918 Beach was president of the Author's League. In this capacity he constantly exhorted authors to put film clauses into their publishing contracts and to transform their writings into drama and screenplays. Most refused, believing that the cinema was a low art form that degraded their artistic endeavors. The only exception was Edna Ferber, who also demanded a percentage of the profits for filming her works. On the occasions that novels and short stories were adapted, the one-time payments that authors received to film their works were small, varying greatly from film company to film company. In frustration, Beach resigned the position in 1918 and concentrated on writing until the mid-1930s.

From his wandering search for gold and stories in Alaska to his unique film clause in his contract with Harper Brothers to his pioneering lease arrangement with film corporations, he established precedents that others would follow years later and that define popular authors after mid-century. He not only had an innate sense of what people would read, but also, ever alert to other potential media markets, he knew what people would pay to see as thrilling entertainment on stage and on film. Above all, Beach had a formidable passion for financial success. He viewed his mind as a creative factory producing a marketable product. Writing involved raw material, production, and sales. The end result was profit.

Not content with his literary and entertainment achievements, Beach used his profits to buy a seven-thousand-acre estate in Florida where he became a successful cattle rancher in the 1930s. He wrote articles about the nutritional value of growing crops in mineral-rich soils. He bought an additional two thousand acres at Avon Park and grew gladioli and Easter lilies at substantial profit. In the 1940s he developed and wrote more than forty episodes of an unproduced radio series based on his autobiography, Personal Exposures.

Beach sold everything he wrote, except for the radio series and an unfinished novel that he was writing at the time of his death. He and his wife, Edith Greta Crater, divided their time between a New York penthouse and their 250-acre estate in Sebring, Florida. His wife, whom he had met in Alaska and married in 1907, died in 1947 after a lengthy illness. On the morning of December 7, 1949, saddened by his wife's death, nearly blind, and devastated by the pain and other effects of throat cancer, Rex Beach ended his life with a pistol shot to the head. He was seventy-two.

—James R. Belpedio