Since Yesterday ( 1940), a sort of sequel that covered the Depression of the 1930s, was also a bestseller. His most famous book was the enormously popular Only Yesterday ( 1931), which chronicled American life in the 1920s. Pringle, and Allan Nevins (before his Columbia appointment). Aside from Allen, these historians included Carl Sandburg, Bernard DeVoto, Douglas Southall Freeman, Henry F. This interest was met, not by the university-employed historian, but by an amateur historian writing in his free time. His wife, Dorothy Penrose Allen, died just prior to the 1931 publication of his best-known book, Only Yesterday.Īllen's popularity coincided with increased interest in history among the book-buying public of the 1920s and 1930s. He began working for Harper's in 1923, becoming editor-in-chief in 1941, a position he held until shortly before his death, aged 63, in New York City. He taught at Harvard briefly thereafter before becoming assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly in 1914, and then managing editor of The Century in 1916.

He studied at Groton, graduated from Harvard University in 1912 and received his Master's in 1913. His specialty was writing about recent and popular history.Īllen was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Deftly written, with a humorous touch, Only Yesterday traces, beneath the excitements of day-to-day life in the 20s, those currents in national life and thought which are the essence of true history.Frederick Lewis Allen (J– February 13, 1954) was the editor of Harper's Magazine and also notable as an American historian of the first half of the twentieth century. Allen's lively narrative brings back an endless variety of half-forgotten events, fashions, crazes, and absurdities.

Here is the story of Woodrow Wilson's defeat, the Harding scandals, the Coolidge prosperity, the revolution in manners and morals, the bull market and its smash-up.

Only Yesterday deals with that delightful decade from the Armistice in November 1918 to the panic and depression of 1929-30. Originally published in 1931, Only Yesterday has an exuberance and proximity to its subject-the Roaring Twenties in all its scandal and glory-that uniquely captures the feel of the era. 'A perfectly grand piece of historical record and synthetic journalism.' - Chicago Daily Tribuneįrom Frederick Lewis Allen, former editor-in-chief of Harper's magazine, comes a classic history of 1920s America, from the end of World War I to the stock market crash and the beginning of The Great Depression.

Only Yesterday by Frederick Lewis Allen