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When he received the questionnaire, McAleer had written back that he wouldn’t promise not to mention the autobiography idea again.13 He also wrote that he was sending along a copy of his biography on Dreiser. He didn’t mention a Stout biography outright; was he trying to tell Stout something by sending the Dreiser book? Did he want Stout to know that he was the man for the job, if it came to it? McAleer wrote letters through the summer every few weeks, never shorter than two pages. Stout, when he replied, never wrote more than a single half page. His brevity in writing did not reflect his growing appreciation for his scholarly groupie. In August, Stout invited McAleer to visit his home. For the past thirty years Stout had lived on the border of New York and Connecticut, at an estate he called “High Meadow.” He had built himself, with a crew of inexperienced laborers in 1929, the year he published a first attempt at a mainstream novel. 1929 was also the year Stout lost much of the capital he’d accumulated during the previous thirteen years in finance when the Stock Market crashed. McAleer brought his wife, Ruth—cousin of Tip O’Neill, Speaker of the House—and his children to meet the writer and his wife, Pola. In a 1986 retrospective, McAleer would somewhat misleadingly represent this meeting as his first contact with Stout. The article, entitled “Some Thoughts on Being a Literary Biographer,” began, “I became acquainted with Rex Stout when he read my biography of Dreiser and invited me to visit him.”14 While not technically inaccurate, it glosses the fact that McAleer had been writing letters for months. Had he wanted to hide the fact that the origins of his authorized biography lay in a fan letter? Whatever the reason, this first meeting was an apparent success. As the fall term started, McAleer continued writing letters. Now he addressed them, “Dear Rex.” By the end of the year, McAleer had made up his mind. The day after Christmas, he typed a typically long letter to Stout. “Since you seem committed to the folly of not writing an autobiography,” McAleer wrote, “I am building a file of information on you with the idea of doing a biography on you eventually.”15 Meanwhile, McAleer was finding more places to insert Stout into the classroom: on the syllabus for his Spring 1970 “Survey in American Literature” course was “Black Orchids,” a 1941 story; his “Sophomore Rhetoric” class in the Evening College had a week dedicated to Fer-de-Lance, the first novel featuring Nero Wolfe.16 During the next two years, McAleer carried a full teaching schedule and kept busy with work on a first edition of Dreiser’s Notes on Life.17 McAleer wrote Stout monthly with never less than three pages of double-spaced type (Stout had been hospitalized, and McAleer decided to spare the eyes of a man now in his ninth decade18), and the page number was usually closer to five. Without any clear agenda, he began to reread the Stout books he owned; he visited used books stores in the Boston area and sought out collectors across the country to obtain the ones he didn’t. In doing so, McAleer became acquainted with a number of Rex Stout fans and formed an idea of starting a Nero Wolfe newsletter. Stout was against it.19 Meanwhile, the bookshelf in the study grew a foot taller with the addition of a new shelf.20 McAleer wrote Stout about everything: the latest Nero Wolfe novel he had found, his family’s summer holidays at Green Harbor in Cape Cod,21 the difficulties with publishers in getting the Dreiser edition finished.22 But Stout’s declining health (he was back in the hospital for surgery in September 1971)23 lurked, ever-present, as asides and by-the-ways tucked in the letters.
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