Hervey Allen

Born in Pittsburgh in 1889, he wrote poetry, biography, and fiction, and is remembered as one of the notable American literary figures of the first half of the twentieth century. Early in his career he published verse, including Ballads of the Border, and later gained attention for Israfel, his biography of Edgar Allan Poe.

His biggest success came with Anthony Adverse in 1933, a sweeping historical novel that became a bestseller and was later adapted for film. The book made him widely known and is often described as an important forerunner of the modern American historical novel.

He continued writing ambitious historical fiction in his later years, including work on the colonial American series The Disinherited. He died in 1949 in Coconut Grove, Florida, leaving behind a body of work that moved easily between poetry, literary history, and large-scale storytelling.