Editing Nero Wolfe (section)

===Origins===
[[Image:Lovcen-011-p1010050.jpg|thumb|Nero Wolfe and his boyhood friend Marko Vukčić hunted dragonflies in the mountains where Wolfe was born, in the vicinity of [[Lovćen]]]]
{{blockquote|You, gentlemen, are Americans, much more completely than I am, for I wasn't born here. This is your native country. It was you and your brothers, black and white, who let me come here and live, and I hope you'll let me say, without getting maudlin, that I'm grateful to you for it.|Nero Wolfe speaking to the black staff of Kanawha Spa in ''[[Too Many Cooks (novel)|Too Many Cooks]]'' (1938), chapter&nbsp;10}}

The corpus implies or states that Nero Wolfe was born in [[Principality of Montenegro|Montenegro]], with one exception: In the first chapter of ''[[Over My Dead Body (novel)|Over My Dead Body]]'' (1939), Wolfe tells an [[FBI]] agent that he was born in the United States – a declaration at odds with all other references. Stout revealed the reason for the discrepancy in a 1940 letter cited by his authorized biographer, John McAleer: "In the original draft of ''[[Over My Dead Body (novel)|Over My Dead Body]]'' Nero was a Montenegrin by birth, and it all fitted previous hints as to his background; but violent protests from ''[[The American Magazine]]'', supported by Farrar & Rinehart, caused his cradle to be transported five thousand miles."<ref name=McAleer/>{{Rp|403}}{{efn|See also ''[[Over My Dead Body (novel)#Plot introduction|Over My Dead Body]]''.}}

"I got the idea of making Wolfe a Montenegrin from [[Louis Adamic]]," Stout said, noting that everything he knew about [[Montenegrins]] he learned from Adamic's book, ''The Native's Return'' (1934), or from Adamic himself.<ref name=McAleer/>{{Rp|278}}

:"Adamic describes the Montenegrin male as tall, commanding, dignified, courteous, hospitable," McAleer wrote. "He is reluctant to work, accustomed to isolation from women. He places women in a subordinate role. He is a romantic idealist, apt to go in for dashing effects to express his spirited nature. He is strong in family loyalties, has great pride, is impatient of restraint. Love of freedom is his outstanding trait. He is stubborn, fearless, unsubduable, capable of great self-denial to uphold his ideals. He is fatalistic toward death. In short, Rex had found for Wolfe a nationality that fitted him to perfection."<ref name=McAleer/>{{Rp|403}}

Wolfe is reticent about his youth, but apparently he was athletic, fit, and adventurous. In the earliest novels, Wolfe had been living in the brownstone on West Thirty-Fifth Street since about 1914, but in later novels this chronology is [[retconned]] away and Wolfe did not arrive in the US until 1930.  Before [[World War I]], he spied for the [[Austria-Hungary|Austrian government]]'s [[Evidenzbureau]], but had a change of heart when the war began. He then joined the [[Kingdom of Serbia|Serbian]]-[[Kingdom of Montenegro|Montenegrin]] army and [[Serbian Campaign (World War I)|fought against the Austrians and Germans]]. That means that he was likely to have been involved in the harrowing 1915 withdrawal of the defeated Serbian army, when thousands of soldiers died from disease, starvation, and sheer exhaustion{{efn|
"I starved to death in 1916," Wolfe states in the first chapter of ''[[Over My Dead Body (novel)|Over My Dead Body]]''. "When the Austrians came and we fought machine guns with fingernails. Logically I was dead; a man can't live on dry grass. Actually I went on breathing. When the United States entered the war and I walked six hundred miles to join the [[American Expeditionary Forces|A.E.F.]], I ate again."
}}
– which might help to explain the comfort-loving habits that are such a conspicuous part of Wolfe's character. He joined the [[American Expeditionary Forces]], and after a time in Europe and North Africa, he came to the United States.

====Influences====
According to John J. McAleer, Rex Stout's official biographer, during his stint in the Navy, Stout came into contact with [[Alvey A. Adee]], who was a major influence on Stout's creation of Nero Wolfe. Adee was a scholar, sleuth, gourmet, bachelor, a model of efficiency, a master of the English language, and is said to have inspired the characterization of Wolfe. Other than Adee, Rex Stout's maternal grandmother, Emily Todhunter, who was obese requiring a special chair and was addicted to atlases, dictionaries and flowers, as well as an omnivorous reader, served as a model.<ref>{{cite web |first=John J. |last=McAleer |date=1977 |title=Rex Stout: A biography |url=https://silo.pub/rex-stout-a-biography.html |access-date=2023-01-10 |website=silo.pub |lang=en |quote=The linked website states that John J. McAleer is John McAleer Theodore Dreiser’s pseudonym.}}</ref>

For Archie, Chief A.G Goodwin, an officer who recovered Rex Stout's stolen record collection, served as a model.<ref name=McAleer/>

====Suppositions====
In 1956, [[John Drury Clark|J. D. Clark]] theorized in an article in ''[[The Baker Street Journal]]'' that [[Sherlock Holmes]] and [[Irene Adler]] (a character from "[[A Scandal in Bohemia]]") had an affair in Montenegro in 1892, and that Nero Wolfe was the result. The idea was later co-opted by [[William S. Baring-Gould|W. S. Baring-Gould]] and implied in the novels of [[Nicholas Meyer]] and [[John Lescroart]], but there is no evidence that Rex Stout had any such connection in mind. Certainly there is no mention of it in any of the stories, although a painting of Sherlock Holmes does hang over Archie Goodwin's desk in Nero Wolfe's office. Some commentators note both physical and psychological resemblances and suggest Sherlock's brother [[Mycroft Holmes]] as a more likely father for Wolfe. Commentators have noted a coincidence in the names "Sherlock Holmes" and "Nero Wolfe": The same vowels appear in the same order. In 1957, [[Ellery Queen]] called this "The great O-E theory" and suggested that it was derived from the father of mysteries, [[Edgar Allan Poe]].<ref>{{cite book |last=Queen |first=Ellery |author-link=Ellery Queen |year=1957 |title=In the Queens' Parlor |location=New York, NY |publisher=[[Simon & Schuster]] |pages=4–5 |oclc=2628466 }}</ref> The only mention of Wolfe's mother in Stout's stories is in the first novel, ''Fer-de-Lance'' (1935), in which it is stated that she lives in [[Budapest]] and Wolfe sends her a monthly check.

Some [[Wold Newton family|Wold Newton]] theorists have suggested the French thief [[Arsène Lupin]] as the father of Nero Wolfe. They note that in one story Lupin has an affair with the queen of a Balkan principality, which may be Montenegro by another name. Further, they note that the name Lupin resembles the French word for wolf, ''loup''.<ref>
{{cite web
  | last = Ruaud | first = A.-F.
  | year = 2002 
  | title = Arsène Lupin: A Timeline
  | website = Cool French Comics
  | url = http://www.coolfrenchcomics.com/arsenelupintimeline.htm
  | access-date = 2007-11-16
}}
</ref>