Although some scholars may recognize him first for his excellent biography Israfel: The Life and Times of Edgar Allen Poe (1926), Hervey Allen also wrote one of the best-selling historical novels of all times-- Anthony Adverse (1933), whose sales by 1968 had reached nearly three million. More than that, however, Allen wrote four other novels, as well as a number of books of verse, a book on his experiences in World War I (Toward the Flame, 1926), and a book containing two long short stories about World War I (It Was Like This, 1940).

An admirer of James Joyce, Allen was more impressed with that writer's presentation of the range of human nature than with his experimental style. Indeed, Allen felt that the reading public had had its fill of books that focused on the abnormal and the neurotic and that exhibited the view that modern times were different from or more complex...