[1] Born in Walpole, New Hampshire, the son of Reverend Nathaniel Glover Allen and Harriet Ann (Schouler) Allen, he studied at Harvard University.
[1] After graduating in 1901, he was appointed librarian to the Boston Society of Natural History, and in 1904, obtained a Ph.D. from Harvard.
He traveled widely, to Central and South America, to East and West Africa, the Nile, the Belgian Congo as a member of the eight-man Harvard Medical African Expedition (1926–1927),[3] and Australia as a member of the six-man Harvard Australian Expedition (1931–1932) along with his student, Ralph Nicholson Ellis.
[4] His publications include: Bats: Biology, Behavior and Folklore (1939), which in its time was regarded as the leading introduction to the chiroptera,[5][6] Checklist of African Mammals, and Mammals of China and Mongolia.
He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1915,[7] and the president of the American Society of Mammalogists from 1927 to 1929.