James Lane Allen

Born in Fayette County, Kentucky, in 1849, he grew up in the landscape that would become the heart of his fiction. After studying at what is now Transylvania University and teaching for a time, he turned to writing and built a reputation as an interpreter of Kentucky life.

Allen became one of the best-known regional writers of his era. Books such as A Kentucky Cardinal, The Choir Invisible, and The Reign of Law brought him a wide readership, and his stories often joined the beauty of the Bluegrass with questions of love, change, religion, and social custom.

He spent much of his later life in Kentucky and New York, and he died in 1925. Today he is remembered for giving American readers a rich, literary portrait of Kentucky at a moment when regional writing held a major place in national culture.