Frederick Lewis Allen
Allen, Frederick Lewis, 1890-1954, American social historian and editor, b. Boston, grad. Harvard (B.A., 1912; M.A., 1913). He is best remembered for his journalistic but nonetheless penetrating works of social history, including Only Yesterday (1932), Since Yesterday (1940), and The Big Change (1952). After teaching English at Harvard, he was an assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly (1914-16), then managing editor of The Century (1916-17). In 1923 he began working for Harper's Magazine, where he remained until 1953, becoming chief editor in 1941.
Houghton Mifflin Chronology of US Literature:
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Works by Frederick Lewis Allen
(1890-1954)
| 1931 | Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties. Allen offers a popular overview of the past decade's politics, morals, fashions, and art. Allen served on the editorial staff of the Atlantic Monthly (1914-1916), Century magazine (1916-1917), and Harper's Magazine (1923-1953). |
| 1935 | The Lords of Creation. Allen traces the American economic expansion from the 1890s, mixing analysis and biographical portraits of the leading financiers. |
| 1940 | Since Yesterday. Allen supplies a popular social retrospective of the 1930s written in a chatty style. |
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Lewis Allen
Biography
Upon leaving England's Tettenhall College, Lewis Allen spent several years as a London stage actor and director. During the early years of World War II, Allen moved to Hollywood, where he apprenticed at Paramount Pictures. His maiden directorial effort at Paramount was The Uninvited (1943), one of the best and most plausible ghost stories ever to emerge from an American studio. Few of his subsequent projects came up to the standard set by Uninvited (the 1945 sequel The Unseen was particularly disappointing), though he had a measure of luck guiding such heavily plotted melodramas as Desert Fury (1947), Chicago Deadline (1949) and Appointment with Danger (1951). Free-lancing in the early 1950s, Allen was saddled with the disastrous Columbia biopic Valentino (1951). He recovered sufficiently from this potential career-killer to direct the tautly paced assassination thriller Suddenly (1954). In between his film assignments of the 1950s, Allen found time to direct at least a dozen episodes of the television anthology The Ethel Barrymore Theatre. Lewis Allen's film credits should not be confused with those of songwriter Lewis Allan or producer Lewis M. Allen. ~ Hal Erickson, RoviFilmography:
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Lewis Allen
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Frederick Lewis Allen
"Frederick Allen" redirects here. For other people named Fred Allen, see Fred Allen (disambiguation).
Frederick Lewis Allen (July 5, 1890 Boston, Massachusetts - February 13, 1954 New York City) was the editor of Harper's Magazine and also notable as an American historian of the first half of the twentieth century. His specialty was writing about what was at the time recent and popular history. He studied at Groton and graduated from Harvard University in 1912 and received his Master's in 1913. He taught at Harvard briefly thereafter before becoming assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly in 1914, and then managing editor of The Century in 1916. He began working for Harper's in 1923, becoming editor-in-chief in 1941, a position he held until shortly before his death. His wife, Dorothy Penrose Allen, died just prior to the publication of Only Yesterday.
Allen's popularity coincided with increased interest in history among the book-buying public of the 1920s and 1930s. This interest was met, not by the university-employed historian, but by an amateur historian writing in his free time. Aside from Allen, these historians included Carl Sandburg, Bernard DeVoto, Douglas Southall Freeman, Henry F. Pringle, and Allan Nevins (before his Columbia appointment).[1]
His best-known books were Only Yesterday (1931), a book chronicling American life in the 1920s, and Since Yesterday (1940), which covered the Depression of the 1930s. His last and most ambitious book, The Big Change, was a social history of the United States from 1900 to 1950. Allen also wrote two biographies, the first of which was about Paul Revere Reynolds, a literary agent of the era. This work is notable because it contains a chapter about Stephen Crane, but is difficult to find because it was privately published.
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Television
In the South Park episode "Sexual Healing", Frederick Allen is listed on the gravestone at Kenny's funeral.
Bibliography
- Allen, Frederick Lewis (1931). Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s. New York: Harper and Row. http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/Allen/Cover.html. (history)
- Allen, Frederick Lewis (1935). The Lords of Creation. New York: Harper and Row. (history, biography, economics)
- Allen, Frederick Lewis (1940). Since Yesterday: The 1930's in America, September 3, 1929 to September 3, 1939. New York: Harper and Row. http://www.archive.org/details/sinceyesterdayth001025mbp. (history)
- Allen, Frederick Lewis (1944). Paul Revere Reynolds: A Biographical Sketch. Scranton: The Haddon Craftsmen. (biography)
- Allen, Frederick Lewis; editors of Look Magazine (1948). Look at America. New York City. A Handbook in Pictures, Maps and Text for the Vacationist, the Traveler and the Stay-at-home. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. (travel)
- Allen, Frederick Lewis (1949). The Great Pierpont Morgan. New York: Harper and Row. (biography)
- Allen, Frederick Lewis (1952). The Big Change - America's Transformation 1900-1950. New York: Harper and Row. (history)
Notes
- ^ Higham, John (1986). History : Professional Scholarship in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. pp. 76–77.
External links
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Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Frederick Lewis Allen |
- Only Yesterday hypertext from American Studies at the University of Virginia.
- Works by Frederick Lewis Allen at Project Gutenberg Australia
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Copyrights:
Columbia Encyclopedia
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2012, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/.
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Houghton Mifflin Chronology of US Literature
The Chronology of American Literature, edited by Daniel S. Burt. Copyright © 2004 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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