Rex Ellingwood Beach (September 1, 1877 – December 7, 1949) was an American novelist, playwright, and Olympic water polo player. Many of his novels were adapted into films.
Early life
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).
1904 Olympic medal
Beach played water polo for the Chicago Athletic Association (CAA) under Coach John Robinson during his law school years in Chicago. Beach was a member of the water polo team which won the silver medal in the 1904 Summer Olympics in St. Louis.
Writing career
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. 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.
