Donald Allen

For the Australian cricketer, see Donald Allen (cricketer).

Donald Merriam Allen (Muscatine, Iowa, March 26, 1912 – San Francisco, California, August 29, 2004) was an American editor, publisher and translator.^[1][2] He is best known for editing the popular anthology of avant-garde post-World War II poets, The New American Poetry 1945-1960.^[3]

Early life

Allen was born in Muscatine, Iowa in 1912, the son of a doctor. He graduated from the University of Iowa in 1934, and stayed there to earn his M.A. in English literature the following year.^[1] During World War II, he served in the U.S. Navy. He was involved in some combat, earning a Purple Heart and Bronze Star,^[4] but also used his facility for languages to work as a Japanese translator.^[2] After leaving the service, he pursued postgraduate studies at University of California Berkeley until 1949. He then accepted a job in New York as editor of Grove Press, a position he would hold until 1970.^[1]

Career

Allen was one of the first U.S. translators of the Romanian-French Absurdist playwright Eugène Ionesco. Allen's 1958 volume, Four Plays of Eugène Ionesco, helped introduce the playwright to American audiences.

Along with editing works by Lew Welch, Allen edited Frank O'Hara, including his Collected Poems (1971; 1991) and Selected Poems (1974). O'Hara refers directly to Allen in "Personal Poem", which is in Lunch Poems (a book that Allen also edited). O'Hara writes, in reference to a conversation he had with LeRoi Jones, "we don't like Lionel Trilling / we decide, we like Don Allen." John Rechy records in his memoirs that Allen offered him the contract to publish City of Night.^[5]

Prior to 1960, Allen occasionally wrote poetry himself, but largely gave up the practice to focus on finding and publishing other writers.^[6] In 1960, he moved from New York to San Francisco, where he established Grey Fox Press and the Four Seasons Foundation, two literary presses that published works by Beat Generation, San Francisco Renaissance, Black Mountain, and New York School writers. As CEO of Grey Fox Press, he published writings by Jack Spicer, along with Enough Said (1980) by Philip Whalen, and I Remain (1980), a collection of Welch's letters. Other authors published by Grey Fox Press included Richard Brautigan, Robert Duncan, Jack Kerouac, Joanne Kyger, Philip Lamantia, Charles Olson, John Rechy, Michael Rumaker, Aaron Shurin, and Gary Snyder.

Also in 1960, Allen edited the popular anthology The New American Poetry 1945-1960, released through Grey Fox Press. It introduced over 40 avant-garde poets to American readers. In addition to presenting more than 200 poems, the anthology included a section titled "Statements on Poetics", which offered a discussion of experimental aesthetics from the likes of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Philip Whalen, Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, LeRoi Jones, John Wieners, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.^[7] When the anthology was reissued by University of California Press in 1999, the publisher stated that more than 100,000 copies had been sold.^[8]

While working with the Four Seasons Foundation, Allen assisted in the publication of (among others): Interviews (1980) by Edward Dorn, A Quick Graph: Collected Notes and Essays (1970) by Robert Creeley, and The Graces (1983) by Aaron Shurin. In 1997, Allen helped edit, along with Benjamin Friedlander, the Collected Prose of Charles Olson (University of California Press).

Grey Fox Press

Grey Fox Press and Four Seasons Foundation were among the many emerging presses that City Lights distributed in the late 1960s, and when Don Allen began thinking about retirement, City Lights offered to acquire the backlists. City Lights went on to publish significant works from those presses in their City Lights/Grey Fox series.^[9]

The Donald Allen Collection, processed in 1991 for a special collection series at the UC San Diego library, contains materials that Allen published through the Four Seasons Foundation and Grey Fox Press. The papers document his editing and publishing efforts, primarily dating from 1957 to 1975, but also with material going as far back as the 1930s.^[2]

Death

Donald Allen died of pneumonia in San Francisco on August 29, 2004.^[10] He was 92.