Frederick Lewis Allen (July 5, 1890 – February 13, 1954) was the editor of Harper's Magazine and also notable as an American historian of the first half of the twentieth century.

His wife, Dorothy Penrose Allen (née Cobb, a first cousin of Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker), died just prior to the 1931 publication of his best-known book, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s.

Aside from Allen, these historians included Carl Sandburg, Bernard DeVoto, Douglas Southall Freeman, Henry F. Pringle, and Allan Nevins (before his Columbia appointment).

The 1933 Hollywood film Only Yesterday was ostensibly based on his book, but actually used only its timeline,[3] with a fictional plot adapted from a Stefan Zweig novel.

[citation needed] He wrote the introduction to Mabel S. Ulrich's collection of essays by notable woman writers of the day, including Mary Borden, Margaret Culkin Banning, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Susan Ertz, E. M. Delafield, Rebecca West, Isabel Paterson and Storm Jameson, The More I See Of Men (Harper & Brothers, 1932).