Rex Beach
| Rex Beach | |
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| Born | Rex Ellingwood Beach September 1, 1877 Atwood, Michigan, United States |
| Died | December 7, 1949 (aged 72) |
| Occupation | Novelist, playwright |
| Olympic medal record | ||
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| Men’s Water polo | ||
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1904 St. Louis | Team competition |
Rex Ellingwood Beach (September 1, 1877 – December 7, 1949) was an American novelist, playwright, and Olympic water polo player.
Rex Beach was born in Atwood, Michigan, but moved to Tampa, Florida, with his family where his father was growing fruit trees. Beach was educated at Rollins College, Florida (1891-6), the Chicago College of Law (1896-7), and Kent College of Law, Chicago (1899-1900). In 1900 he was drawn to Alaska at the time of the Klondike Gold Rush. After five years of unsuccessful prospecting, he turned to writing.
His second novel The Spoilers (1906) was based on a true story of corrupt government officials stealing gold mines from prospectors, which he witnessed while he was prospecting in Nome, Alaska.The Spoilers became one of the best selling novels of 1906.
His adventure novels, influenced by Jack London, were immensely popular throughout the early 1900s. Beach was lionized as the "Victor Hugo of the North," but others found his novels formulaic and predictable. Critics described them as cut from the "he-man school" of literature: stories of "strong hairy men doing strong hairy deeds." Alaska historian Stephen Haycox has said that many of Beach's works are "mercifully forgotten today."
One novel, The Silver Horde (1909), is set in Kalvik, a fictionalized community in Bristol Bay, Alaska, and tells the story of a down on his luck gold miner who discovers a greater wealth in Alaska's run of salmon (silver horde) and decides to open a cannery. To accomplish this he must overcome the relentless opposition of the "salmon trust," a fictionalized Alaska Packers' Association, which undercuts his financing, sabotages his equipment, incites a longshoremen's riot and bribes his fishermen to quit. The story line includes a love interest as the protagonist is forced to choose between his fiance, a spoiled banker's daughter, and an earnest roadhouse operator, a woman of "questionable virtue." Real life cannery superintendent Crescent Porter Hale has been credited with being the inspiration for The Silver Horde, but it is unlikely Beach and Hale ever met.
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