Frederick Lewis Allen
Frederick Lewis Allen was a prominent American writer and editor born in Boston in 1890. He graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor's in English and a master's in modern languages, later teaching at the university before transitioning into journalism. Allen served as assistant editor for The Atlantic Monthly and then as managing editor for The Century Magazine, during which he penned several notable short stories. His career flourished in the 1920s when he began to explore American life through a blend of storytelling and historical analysis. His best-known work, "Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920's in America," published in 1931, offers a vivid account of the decade, capturing its political, social, and economic dynamics. Allen continued to write influential works throughout his career, including "Since Yesterday" and "The Big Change," which examine subsequent decades and societal transformations in America. He also authored a biography of financier J. P. Morgan, further showcasing his expertise in blending narrative with historical fact. Allen's contributions to literature and historical writing provide valuable insights into early 20th-century American society.
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Frederick Lewis Allen
Author
- Born: July 5, 1890
- Birthplace: Boston, Massachusetts
- Died: February 12, 1954
- Place of death: New York, New York
Biography
Born in Boston in 1890, Frederick Lewis Allen developed a keen interest in reading and writing early in his childhood. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English from Harvard University in 1912, and he earned his master’s degree in modern languages from Harvard in 1913. After teaching English at Harvard for two years, Allen served as an assistant editor for The Atlantic Monthly from 1914 to 1916. He then assumed the role of managing editor for The Century Magazine until 1917. Between 1915 and 1917, Allen wrote some very popular short stories for the magazine, including “Cart Before the Horse” (1915), “Fixing Up the Balkans” (1917), “Big Game” (1917), and “Small Talk” (1917). In 1918, he moved to Washington, D.C., to serve on the Council of National Defense. That same year, he married Dorothy Penrose Cobb. They had two children.
Having developed the ability to write details like a novelist and to keep track of the facts like a historian, Allen began writing about current events and popular history in the 1920’s. He became an expert in writing structured reviews of life in America. In 1925, he joined the editorial staff of Harper’s Magazine and worked there for almost thirty years, serving as the editor-in-chief from 1941 until 1953. After the death of his wife in 1930, Allen published a best seller, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920’s in America (1931). In this classic book, Allen reviewed the politics, morals, fashions, and art of the 1920’s. He vividly and precisely tracked the major economic trends of that decade and explored in depth the underlying causes of the great stock market crash of 1929. Allen’s power as a storyteller, combined with the fact that he witnessed the events firsthand, produced a powerful historical narrative of American life that projects a clear image of the 1920’s.
Allen combined his talent for analysis of events with his ability for reporting narrative details in The Lords of Creation (1935), which traces the economic ups and downs in America from 1900 into the 1930’s and contains biographical portraits of the leading financiers during that period of time. In 1940, he published Since Yesterday, a companion volume to Only Yesterday that chronicles life in America during the 1930’s. Written in a conversationalist style, it is a practical, educational review that projects a popular social retrospective of that decade of American history.
In 1949, Allen wrote an insightful biography about imperial banker J. P. Morgan, The Great Pierpont Morgan (1949). In 1950, Allen published The Big Change: America Transforms Itself, 1900-1950, which is an overview of the changes that occurred in American society during the first half of the twentieth century. In this work, Allen again demonstrates his talent as a writer to analyze multiple facets of a complex story in order to reveal the underlying trends of life and thought that evolved in America. The book provided the subject material for a Christopher Award-winning television special in 1952.