Hervey Allen

Hervey Allen, Jr. (1889 - 1949) was an American author. He graduated from Shady Side Academy in 1909, attended the United States Naval Academy from 1910 to 1911, and graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 1915, where he also became a member of the Sigma Chi fraternity. He wrote Toward the Flame (1926), a nonfiction account of his experiences in WWI. His first book, Wampum and Old Gold, was awarded the Yale Younger Poets Prize. Allen is best known for his work Anthony Adverse. He also planned a series of novels about colonial America called The Disinherited. He completed three works in the series: The Forest and the Fort (1943), Bedford Village (1944), and Toward the Morning (1948). The novels tell the story of Salathiel Albine, a frontiersman kidnapped as a boy by Shawnee Indians in the 1750s. All three works were collected and published as The City in the Dawn. Allen also wrote Israfel (1926), a biography of American writer Edgar Allan Poe. Among his friends were DuBose Heyward, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Robert Frost, Ogden Nash, and Henry Chapin. In the 1940s, he co-edited the Rivers of America Series with Carl Carmer.