Allen Norton

Allen Norton was an American poet and literary editor active in the 1910s and 1920s. He studied literature at Harvard and became part of the lively experimental culture around small magazines and modern poetry.

With his wife, Louise Norton, he co-edited Rogue, a little magazine published from 1915 to 1916. The magazine became an early home for writers including Wallace Stevens, Mina Loy, Alfred Kreymborg, and Walter Conrad Arensberg, placing Norton close to an important moment in American literary modernism.

He also published his own 1914 poetry collection, Saloon Sonnets With Sunday Flutings, a book noted for its fin-de-siècle style and literary flair. Later accounts of his life are unusually dramatic: after additional marriages and years of personal change, he reportedly disappeared in January 1945, and his remains were identified years later.