In 1904, Beach was a member of the American water polo team which won the silver medal in the 1904 Summer Olympics in St. Louis.
Writing career
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.[4]The Spoilers became one of the best selling novels of 1906.
Rex Beach Cabin, Rampart, Alaska
His adventure novels, influenced by Jack London,[5] 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."[6]
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.
Beach occasionally produced his films and also wrote a number of plays to varying success. In 1926 Beach was paid $25,000 (~$344,617 in 2023) to write a brochure entitled The Miracle of Coral Gables to promote the real estate development of Coral Gables, Florida, a planned city.[7]
Death and legacy
Rex Beach moved to Sebring in the 1920s, where he lived at the Harder Hall Hotel before buying a home in town in 1929.[8] In 1949, two years after the death of his wife Edith, Beach committed suicide in Sebring, Florida at the age of 72.[9] In 2005, when the home Beach lived in was remodeled, a bullet was found in the wall, believed to be the bullet that ended his life.[10]
Beach served as the first president of the Rollins College Alumni Association. He and his wife are buried in front of the Alumni house.[11]
Beach, and his most famous novel, were commemorated in 2009 by the naming of a public pedestrian/bicycle trail in Dobbs Ferry, NY, a former place of residence. The trail is called "Spoilers Run".[12]
^"Rex Beach". Olympedia. Retrieved February 24, 2021.
^ One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1922). "Beach, Rex". Encyclopædia Britannica (12th ed.). London & New York: The Encyclopædia Britannica Company.
^Adicks, Richard. The Booklover's Guide to Florida. Sarasota, Florida: Pineapple Press, 1992. Page 160.
