author
Charles Fletcher Allen
1849–1914
Best remembered for a lively early-20th-century biography of Davy Crockett, this little-known American writer also had a life beyond books. Sources describe him as a banker, poet, and author, with ties to both Ithaca, New York, and Denver, Colorado.
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About the author
Charles Fletcher Allen was an American writer born in 1849 and died in 1914. The clearest contemporary-style summaries available describe him as a banker, poet, and author, and records connected with his death place him in Denver, Colorado, while burial information links him back to Ithaca, New York.
His best-known surviving work is David Crockett: Scout, Small Boy, Pilgrim, Mountaineer, Soldier, Bear-Hunter, and Congressman, Defender of the Alamo, published in 1911. In that book's prefatory note, he dated himself in Denver in June 1911, which helps place his writing career late in life.
Other sources also associate him with the title Ye Gallant Sophomore, suggesting that his writing ranged beyond frontier history. Reliable biographical details are fairly sparse, but the outline that emerges is of a man who balanced business life with literary interests and left behind at least one enduring popular biography.