Henry Southworth Allen (born 1941 in Summit, New Jersey)^[1] is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, journalist, poet, and artist.^[2]

Allen obtained his degree in English and art at Hamilton College^[1] and Montgomery College.^[2]

Allen began his painting and drawing in the late 1960s.^[3]

He was a stationed in Vietnam in the mid-1960s^[4] as a U.S. Marine.^[1]

Allen was a critic for The New York Review of Books and worked on staff for the New Haven Register.^[4][5] As a staff writer for the Style section, he worked at The Washington Post for 39 years.^[3] In 1975, he was awarded a NEH Journalism Fellowship at the University of Michigan.^[6][1] He left The Washington Post in 2009 after an altercation with a fellow staffer (although he had already announced his resignation and was planning on leaving a few weeks later).^[3][4]

Allen then began teaching courses in cultural analysis in the University of Maryland honors program.^[1]

Allen had solo shows in June 2009 at the Mansion at Strathmore (Maryland) and in August 2012 at the Chebeague Island Library.^[2]

Allen was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2000 for his writings in The Washington Post on photography.^[1]

He appeared on the Colbert Report, February 2, 2010.^{[citation needed]}

• Fool's Mercy (Houghton Mifflin, 1984) ISBN 978-0395320396 — thriller novel
• 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
• Where We Lived: Essays on Places (Mandel Vilar Press, 2017) ISBN 978-1942134442

• Official website