biography
| name: |
Allen, (William) Hervey (Jr)
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1889–1949)
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| biography:
| Writer and poet, born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. He studied at the US Naval Academy and the University of Pittsburgh (1915 BS). He served briefly on the Mexican border with the National Guard, then with the US Army in France during World War 1, and his war diary, Toward the Flame (1926), was highly regarded in its day. After graduate study at Harvard, he taught English at a high school in Charleston, SC (1919–25) and then at several colleges. During the 1920s he published many volumes of his poetry, and lectured on poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference (Vermont), but his reputation as a poet soon faded. He is best known for his still-relevant biography of Edgar Allan Poe, Israfel (1926), and for a popular swashbuckling historical novel, Anthony Adverse (1933), the success of which allowed him to go on writing historical novels set in the Civil War and the Pennsylvania frontier; but none repeated his earlier success. |
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