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=                       Frederick_Lewis_Allen                        =
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                            Introduction
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Frederick Lewis Allen (July 5, 1890 – February 13, 1954) 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 recent and popular history.


                                Life
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Allen was born in Boston, Massachusetts.  He studied at Groton,
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, aged 63, in New York City. His wife, Dorothy
Penrose Allen ('née' Cobb, a first cousin of Ambassador Ellsworth
Bunker), died just prior to the 1931 publication of his best-known
book, 'Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s'.

He died on February 13, 1954, and is buried in lot 395, section 7 of
Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain.


                               Works
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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).

His most famous book was the enormously popular 'Only Yesterday'
(1931), which chronicled American life in the 1920s. 'Since Yesterday'
(1939), a sort of sequel that covered the Depression of the 1930s, was
also a bestseller. The 1933 Hollywood film 'Only Yesterday' was
ostensibly based on his book, but actually used only its timeline,
with a fictional plot adapted from a Stefan Zweig novel.

He wrote the introduction to Mabel S. Ulrich's collection of essays by
notable woman writers of the day, including Mary Borden, Margaret
Culkin Banning, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Susan Ertz, E. M. Delafield,
Rebecca West, Isabel Paterson and Storm Jameson, 'The More I See Of
Men' (Harper & Brothers, 1932).

His last and most ambitious book, 'The Big Change', was a social
history of the United States from 1900 to 1950. (He had originally
written a 'Harper's' article about how America had changed between
1850 and 1950, but decided to limit the chronological scope of his
book.) 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.

In 1950, Allen was one of five narrators for the RKO Radio Pictures
documentary film, 'The Golden Twenties', produced by Time, Inc.


                            Recognition
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The Frederick Lewis Allen Room in the New York Public Library was
established by the Ford Foundation in 1958. It is Room 228e on the
second floor of the library. Admission is limited to writers under
book contract to a publishing company.

Allen's son, Oliver Ellsworth, also worked in journalism with a stint
at 'Life' magazine.


                            Bibliography
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* (history)
* (history, biography, economics)
* (history)
* (biography)
* (travel)
* (biography)
* (history)


                          Further reading
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* Payne, Darwin. 'The man of only yesterday : Frederick Lewis Allen,
former editor of Harper's magazine, author, and interpreter of his
times' (1975) [https://archive.org/details/manofonlyyesterd00payn
online]


                           External links
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*[https://web.archive.org/web/20231004005645/http://xroads.virginia.edu/~Hyper/Allen/Cover.html
'Only Yesterday' ] hypertext from American Studies at the University
of Virginia.
*[https://archive.org/details/sinceyesterdayth001025mbp 'Since
Yesterday'] online from Universal Digital Library.
* [http://gutenberg.net.au/plusfifty-a-m.html#allenfl Works by
Frederick Lewis Allen] at [http://gutenberg.net.au Project Gutenberg
Australia]
*


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Original Article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Lewis_Allen