Word: allens
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Fictional explorations into the historic past have been a striking feature of U.S. writing in the last decade. Said Hervey Allen last week: "It's probably time to come out and say, without being egotistic, that Anthony Adverse started the mode for the modern historical novel." Added he: "If you will look back over a long period of time, you will see that what the public likes most is a rich, large package. I have never streamlined a book to suit an audience...
Within this framework, says Author Allen, will be action "deep in implication." Subthemes will concern the effects of revenge as a racial policy, "the sentimental tradition that we are a merciful and kindly people," the acts of savagery that may arise out of "infantile compulsions." But basic to all will be the idea that the first Americans were neither revolutionaries nor reorganizers. They were "disinherited," and "for the first time in memorized history man was free to act entirely on his own responsibility...
Intense vitality and an eager reaching for vivid incidents combine in Hervey Allen's rapid, narrative style. Less admirable is his tendency to concentrate long, if lovingly, on surfaces. Like his fellow historian in American fiction, Robert Graves, Allen is weakest in his departures into romantic interludes. Unlike Graves, he has a passion for extremes; the 6 ft. 4 in. Salathiel Albine with muscles "like fluid oak wood" and the movements of "a young male panther" sets the superscale that marks the whole work for good and bad. And in his eager use of sentimental aspects of the Scottish...
Writer and War Worker. Popular, friendly, publicity-shunning, William Hervey Allen is a man of many parts. Money in the bank is anathema to him, so proceeds from Anthony Adverse went into realizing Allen's feudal dream of a self-sustaining family unit. With his wife Ann and three children (Marcia, 13; Mary Ann, ii; Richard, 6) he built on Maryland's Eastern Shore "one of the most complete family plants in the world," making bread from his own wheat, wine from his own grapes. Cows, hens and the waters of an inlet from Chesapeake Bay supply...
...Hervey Allen has done, he says, "more writing than almost any American." Behind him are eight books of poems, five of prose. Toward the Flame is considered one of the best U.S. personal records of World War I (of which Allen is a wounded veteran). In biography his greatest claim to scholarly fame is Israfel (TIME, Dec. 24, 1934), a searching study of the life and times of Edgar Allan...