His work is characteristic of the late 19th-century local color era, when writers sought to capture the vernacular in their fiction.

Allen, the youngest child in the family, had four sisters Lydia, May, Sally, and Annie, and two brothers, John and Henry.

In 1880, he was professor of Latin and English at Bethany College (West Virginia); and then became head of a private school at Lexington, Kentucky.

[3] Allen spent his youth in Lexington during the Antebellum era, the American Civil War, and the Reconstruction periods.

At the northern edge of Gratz Park in Lexington is the "Fountain of Youth", built in memory of Allen using proceeds willed to the city by him.