Writer
Allen has been a regularly published writer since 1969, when he became monthly editor of the Topeka Public Library staff newsletter, whose title he changed to And All That! (Someone asked him, "How's the newsletter—and all that?" and a title was born.) He published his first book, a history of his hometown, in 1973; it was reissued in 1991 under the title Denison, Kansas: A Record of a Town and Its People. Between 1982 and 1985, Allen wrote three books that the State Library published. These included The Carnegie Legacy in Kansas, now online at http://skyways.lib.ks.us/carnegie. He wrote marketing communications material for Pacific Bell for 11 years before becoming a contributing writer to books published by Heritage Media Corporation. His articles, reviews and stories have appeared in Washburn University Review, Journal of Genealogy, Topeka Magazine, Show Me Libraries, The San Francisco Examiner, Kansas Heritage, Science of Mind and The Little Balkans Review.
In addition to numerous histories and genealogies, Allen has published anthologies—The Road Is All! Essays on the Celebration of Life and Tales of a Roads Scholar; People and Places of the Heart—of favorite stories gleaned from his newspaper column, which appears in two Kansas weeklies. He is also the author of two books published by Heritage Media Corporation: Fremont, A Modern History of An All-American City and Antelope Valley; A Modern History, and served as contributing photo editor for another Heritage book, Kansas City: Rise of a Regional Metropolis.