"Vividly and with great skills he marshals the men, the mountebanks, the measures, and the events of ten years of American life and causes them to march before us in orderly panathenaic procession."

Frederick Lewis Allen was born in Boston in 1890 and graduated from Harvard in 1912. He served on the editorial staffs of the Atlantic Monthly and Century magazines and was editor in chief of Harper's magazine from 1941 until his death in 1954