Van den Hout lost his credentials as a journalist after World War II for having collaborated with the Nazi propaganda machine, but gained commercial success with the Bob Evers series.
Willem van den Hout was born 3 June 1915 in 's-Hertogenbosch, his father from Brabant and his mother from Groningen, a mixed background that may have resulted in a kind of split personality later in life.
[1] Van den Hout was moved to the department for advertising abroad in 1938, and traveled to the United States and visited Hollywood.
[1] He joined the Nationaal Front in January 1941 and led their propaganda department; he left the organization in August of the same year, voluntarily he said later, though in his semi-autobiographical Bankroet van een politieke beweging, published under his own name in 1943, his character is fired.
After leaving the Nationaal Front he began a career as a freelance writer, writing for a number of fascist and Nazist-associated publications, including De Residentiebode and Jeugd.
(In De Gil, van den Hout coined the term Dolle Dinsdag, for the day in 1944 when Germans and their collaborators panicked at the supposed imminent invasion of the Netherlands.)
After that magazine was shut down he continued working for its radio-version, De Gil-Club, which, supported by the Germans, pretended to be an illegal radio station.