Mr. Allen was born on a farm in Fayette County, Kentucky, a few miles from Lexington; and on the farm he spent his early childhood. His mother's maiden name was Helen Foster. Her parents, who were of the Scotch-Irish stock which settled in Pennsylvania before the Revolution, had found a permanent home in Mississippi. On his father's side he is a descendant of the Virginians who formed the Kentucky pioneers. The son was graduated from Kentucky University—which has been pictured in the history of his latest hero, David,—in 1872. For several years afterward he taught in district schools, at first near his home, and later in Missouri. Still later he became a private tutor; then he took a professorship in his alma mater; and at length he brought his career as a teacher to a close while at Bethany College, West Virginia. That very year, 1884, he moved to New York, put away his text-books, and plunged into the sea of literature. One who knew him in those days has described him as "a blond young giant with a magnificent head and a strong, kindly face."
From the day of his decision to be a writer until the present time Mr. Allen has worked industriously and successfully. Fifteen years ago the chief literary and critical magazines published many of his essays, and from time to time his short stories appeared in Harper's Magazine and The Century Magazine. These short stories were afterward collected and published under the title of "Flute and Violin." Then appeared at irregular intervals "The Blue Grass Region of Kentucky," "A Kentucky Cardinal" and its sequel, "Aftermath," "A Summer in Arcady," "The Choir Invisible," and, latest of all, "The Reign of Law."
The author's high reputation was firmly established by "A Kentucky Cardinal" and "Aftermath." "In these two books," said one critic, looking backward, "Nature was interwoven benignantly with the human nature resting on her bosom, leading her lover, Adam Moss, with gentle influences to the human lover, and, when bereft of human love, receiving him back into her healing arms." The books made as deep an impression upon Englishmen as upon Americans; indeed, as late as the spring of 1900 the London Academy devoted a page to a flattering and most sympathetic review of them. The gentle, playful humor, the healthy joyousness, the rare tenderness displayed by Mr. Allen in these two books, are irresistible. Months, and even years, after laying the books down, the reader must remember the many delightful sketches of which they are made.
"And while I am watching the birds, they are watching me. Not a little fop among them, having proposed and been accepted, but perches on a limb, and has the air of putting his hands mannishly under his coat-tails and crying out to me, 'Hello! Adam, what were you made for?' 'You attend to your business, and I'll attend to mine,' I answer, 'You have one May; I have twenty-five!' He didn't wait to hear. He caught sight of a pair of clear brown eyes peeping at him out of a near tuft of leaves, and sprang thither with open arms and the sound of a kiss."
What charming sport! What uncommon perception! And here is one of his choice, frank, bucolic sentiments:
"The longer I live here the better satisfied I am in having pitched my earthly camp-fire, gypsylike, on the edge of a town, keeping it on one side, and the green fields, lanes and woods on the other. Each, in turn, is to me as a magnet to the needle. At times the needle of my nature points towards the country. On that side everything is poetry. I wander over field and forest, and through me runs a glad current of feeling that is like a clear brook across the meadows of May. At others the needle veers round, and I go to town—to the massed haunts of the highest animal and cannibal. That way nearly everything is prose. I can feel the prose rising in me as I step along, like hair on the back of a dog, long before any other dogs are in sight. And, indeed, the case is much that of a country dog come to town, so that growls are in order at every corner. The only being in the universe at which I have ever snarled, or with which I have rolled over in the mud and fought like a common cur, is Man."
"Summer in Arcady" shocked many who had fallen in love with the pastoral simplicity and spiritual delicacy of the two preceding books; but it was generally admitted that the book showed an advance in the author's powers, particularly in his power of vivid dialogue. In his first novel Mr. Allen had written that "The simple, rural, key-note of life is still the sweetest," and a change to another key-note, tremulous with pathos and tragedy, surprised the reading public; but the opinion that it was likely to prove a stepping-stone to higher things found general favor. Nor was this opinion unsound, for "The Choir Invisible" lifted its author for the time above the heads of all his contemporaries.