Biography

Education

Allen obtained his degree in English and art at Hamilton College and Montgomery College.

Career

Allen began his painting and drawing in the late 1960s.

He was a stationed in Vietnam in the mid-1960s as a marine.

Allen was a critic for The New York Review of Books and worked on staff for the New Haven Register. As a staff writer for the Style section, he worked at The Washington Post for 39 years. In 1975, he was awarded a NEH Journalism Fellowship at the University of Michigan. He left the Washington Post in 2009 after an altercation with a fellow staffer.

He then began teaching courses in cultural analysis in the University of Maryland honors program.

Allen had solo shows in June 2009 at Strathmore Hall and in August 2012 at the Chebeague Island Library.

Awards and honors

Allen was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2000 for his writings in the Washington Post on photography.

Appearances

He appeared on the Colbert Report, February 2, 2010.

Bibliography

• Fool's Mercy (Houghton Mifflin, 1984) ISBN 978-0395320396 — collection of essays
• Going Too Far Enough: American Culture at Century's End (Smithsonian, 1994) ISBN 978-1560983675— collection of Washington Post columns
• The Museum of Lost Air: Poems (Dryad Press, 1998)
• What It Felt Like: Living in the American Century (Pantheon Books, October 2000) ISBN 978-0375420634

[ Source: Wikipedia ]