Frederick Lewis Allen is remembered mainly as a longtime editor of Harper's magazine and as a popular social historian. His tenure with Harper's began in 1923 with the position of editorial assistant and continued through 1953, when he resigned his position as editor in chief. Allen might be described as a New England, Ivy League gentleman editor. His biographer, Darwin Payne, regards Allen's career as a bridge between the proprieties and elitism of America's Victorian age and the leveling mass culture that began to spread rapidly in the 1950s. Both as editor and author, Allen was much concerned with traditional values in this changing culture.

Allen was born into a line of prosperous merchants and churchmen who traced their ancestry to not one but seven Plymouth Colony Pilgrims. His father, Frederick Baylies Allen, was a minister, first a Congregationalist and later an Episcopalian, whose first wife, Louisa Ripley Vose, died...