Gay Wilson Allen

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Gay Wilson Allen (August 23, 1903 – August 6, 1995) was an American academic and writer. After holding assistant and associate professorships between the late 1920s to mid 1930s, Allen was hired by Bowling Green University in 1935 as an associate professor. Upon leaving for New York University in 1946, Allen was an English professor until 1969. Apart from working as a visiting scholar until the late 1970s, Allen was on a literary trip with William Faulkner that was sponsored by the United States Department of State during 1955.

As an author, Allen primarily focused on Walt Whitman with his writings between the early 1940s to late 1990s. Of his Whitman works, Allen was a lead editor on ''The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman'', which was released in twenty two books. For his biographies, some of his subjects included Whitman, William James, Ralph Waldo Emerson and J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur. With ''The Solitary Singer: A Critical Biography of Walt Whitman'', Allen was nominated for the 1956 National Book Award for Nonfiction. For ''Waldo Emerson: A Biography'', Allen was nominated for the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography the same year. Allen received two Guggenheim Fellowships in the 1950s and became part of the New Jersey Literary Hall of Fame in 1983.