Rex Beach

• Name — Rex Beach • Birth Name — Rex Ellingwood Beach • Born — September 1, 1877 • Education — Rollins College Chicago College of Law Kent College of Law • Birthplace — Atwood, Michigan, U.S. • Died — 7 December 1949 • Place of death — Sebring, Florida, U.S. • Occupation — Novelist, playwright

Rex Beach was born in Atwood, Michigan, and moved to Tampa, Florida, with his family where his father was growing fruit trees. Beach studied at Rollins College, Florida (1891–1896), the Chicago College of Law (1896–97), 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. • Illustration — Rex Beach Cabin, Rampart, Alaska 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. 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 fiancée, 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. After success in literature, many of his works were adapted into successful films; The Spoilers became a stage play, then was remade into movies five times from 1914 to 1955, with Gary Cooper and John Wayne each playing "Roy Glennister" in 1930 and 1942, respectively. The Silver Horde was twice made into a movie, as a silent film in 1920 starring Myrtle Stedman, Curtis Cooksey and Betty Blythe and directed by Frank Lloyd; and a talkie version The Silver Horde (1930) that starred Jean Arthur, Joel McCrea, and Evelyn Brent and was directed by George Archainbaud. Beach occasionally produced his films and also wrote a number of plays to varying success. In 1926 Beach was paid $25,000 (~$ in) to write a brochure entitled The Miracle of Coral Gables to promote the real estate development of Coral Gables, Florida, a planned city.

• Pardners (1905) (10 short stories) • The Spoilers (1906) • The Barrier (1908) • The Silver Horde (1909) • Going Some (1910) • The Ne'er-Do-Well (1911) • The Net (1912) • The Iron Trail (1913) • The Auction Block (1914) • Heart of the Sunset (1915) • Rainbow's End (1916) • The Crimson Gardenia (1916) (short stories) • Laughing Bill Hyde (1917) (short stories) • The Winds of Chance (1918) • Too Fat to Fight (1919) • Oh, Shoot (1921) • Flowing Gold (1922) • Big Brother (1923) • North of Fifty-Three (1925) • The Goose Woman • Padlocked • The Mating Call • Don Careless and Birds of Prey (1928) • Son of the Gods (1929) • Money Mad • Men of the Outer Islands • Beyond Control • Alaskan Adventures • Hands of Dr. Locke • Masked Women • Wild Pastures • Jungle Gold • Valley of Thunder • The World in His Arms (1946)

Rex Beach is recorded as writer, screenwriter, novelist, playwright and lawyer.