PCL MS 012 Steve Allen Collection

Although best known for his forty-year career in television, Steve Allen (1921-2000) also worked in radio, motion pictures, the theatre, and in concert and club venues. He was a radio writer, announcer, host, and comedian; television scriptwriter, producer, host, and comedian; jazz and popular music composer, lyricist, singer, and pianist; Broadway playwright and actor; and motion picture actor. He was an advocate for causes including farm workers’ rights and nuclear disarmament. Allen was also a widely published journalist, essayist, poet, and novelist.

Stephen Valentine Patrick William Allen was born on December 26, 1921, in New York, New York. Both parents were in a vaudeville act under the stage name Billy Allen and Belle Montrose. Allen attended Drake University in 1941 and the University of Arizona in 1945. On August 23, 1942, Allen married Dorothy Goodman whom he met while attending Arizona State Teachers' College. The two divorced in 1952 and on July 31, 1954, he married the actress/comedienne Jayne Meadows. Allen had four sons.

Steve Allen made his debut on Phoenix radio station KOY in 1942, where he worked as an announcer, writer, and pianist. Two years later Allen left for Los Angeles, where he performed on radio stations KFAC, KMTR, and KNX from 1944 to 1950. He began his television career in New York City in 1950 on CBS. Allen was the creator and host of the original The Tonight Show on NBC (1954-1956), which introduced such future stars as Steve Lawrence, Eydie Gorme, Andy Williams, Don Knotts, Jonathan Winters, and the Smothers Brothers. In 1956, Allen moved to CBS with The Steve Allen Show (1956-1960; 1968-1972). Allen also hosted the game shows What's My Line and I've Got a Secret. He created, wrote, and hosted the PBS-TV series Meeting of Minds (1977-1981). Steve Allen was inducted into the Television Academy's Hall of Fame in 1986. 

Steve Allen was a prolific songwriter. He has recorded more than forty albums and composed more than four-thousand songs including: "This Could Be the Start of Something Big," "Picnic," and "Gravy Waltz," which won the Grammy Award in 1964. He wrote the title lyrics for the film themes for On the Beach and Bell, Book, and Candle, and scores for several musicals, including the Broadway production of Sophie (1963) and the CBS-TV version of Alice in Wonderland (1985).

As an actor, Allen starred on Broadway in The Pink Elephant (1953), and wrote the play, The Wake, which won a Los Angeles drama critic's nomination as the best play of 1977. Allen also played the title role in the 1956 motion picture, The Benny Goodman Story, and starred in The Comic (1969).

Steve Allen's published credits include memoirs, poetry, short stories, plays, novels, children's books, social commentary, humor and satire, radio and television scripts, reviews, essays, and magazine and newspaper articles. He was a regular columnist for Song Hits, Downbeat, and Cosmopolitan, as well as for several newspapers. Steve Allen published his first collection of poetry in 1946, and his poetry appeared in other collections and periodicals over the years. Allen's first novel, Not All Your Laughter, Not All Your Tears, was published 1962. In 1982, Allen wrote his first mystery novel, The Talk Show Murders, followed by Murder on the Glitter Box in 1989. He also wrote a book for children, Princess Snip Snip and the Puppykittens (1973).

Allen wrote a scholarly study of migratory farm labor, The Ground Is Our Table (1966), and a study of white-collar crime in America, Rip-Off: A Look at Corruption in America (1979). Other book-length non-fiction works by Allen focus on Jesus cults, the atomic bomb, and corruption, and include two popular studies of comedians, The Funny Men (1956) and Funny People (1981).

Allen wrote hundreds of essays, articles, and syndicated columns and gave speeches on a wide range of social issues such as democratic rights, censorship, interracial justice, mental health, police corruption, prison reform, capital punishment, disarmament, morality and nuclear war, education, and mental health. His work appeared in hundreds of magazines and newspapers, including Esquire, Ladies Home Journal, Look, Variety, TV Guide, Playbill, Cue, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and the Detroit News.

Steve Allen received many honors for community service including from the American Civil Liberties Union, Sane (National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy), the American Cancer Society, the National Association for Mental Health, and the Boy Scouts of America.

Steve Allen died October 31, 2000.

Series I: Literary Productions (10 boxes)

Manuscripts (Literary)

1939, 1951-1990

Arranged chronologically by date of work, as indexed by the donor.

This series includes manuscripts for five books, 89 speeches, several poems, and 451 articles by Allen.

Promotional Materials

1972-1973

Arranged alphabetically

This series contains mostly media information from Concept Coordinators (Allen's publicists), including fact sheets, photo cut-lines, list of published books to 1972, and biographical and songwriting information.

Series II: Printed and Other Materials (9 boxes)

Certificates

1980, 1990

Arranged by title

This series includes a certificate from the American Centenarian Committee and two citations for an honorary degree of Doctor of Arts and Letters from St. Mary's College of California and Doctor of Humane Letters Honoris Causea from Siena Heights College in Michigan.

Awards

1953, 1955-1965, 1970, 1977, 1979-1981, 1989

Arranged by title

This series includes 41 awards from various organizations.

Clippings

1957

Arranged by title

This series includes two cartoons depicting the rivalry between the "Steve Allen Show" and the "Ed Sullivan Show" by cartoonists Richter The New Yorker? and Wilson Saturday Evening Post.

Posters (2 boxes)

n.d.

Arranged by title

This series includes posters for the musical Sophie, the musical comedy revue Seymour Glick Is Alive But Sick, the musical performance Steve Allen a Man and His Music, and the motion picture The Benny Goodman Story.

Series III: Photographic Materials (2 boxes)

Photographs

1965

Arranged by title

This series includes 12 prints of Allen: four 8" x 10" black and white photographs and three 8" x 10" color photographs, one 11" x 14" color photograph, one 20" x 10" black and white photograph, two 16" x 20" color photographs, one 16" x 20 black and white photograph. Also included is a signed black and white photograph of Hubert H. Humphrey.

Original Art Work

1960, 1972

Arranged by title

This series includes a hand-painted portrait of Allen by J. S. Orozco and an original cartoon by Frank Interlandi, which appeared in the Los Angeles Times.

Series IV: Audio Recordings (1 box)

Audio Recording Tape

n.d.

Arranged by title

This series includes fourteen cassette tapes of 407 songs written by Steve Allen, and recorded by such vocalists as Nat King Cole, Perry Como, Judy Garland, Steve Lawrence, and Eydie Gorme.

Transfers  

The following books have been integrated into the collections at the Browne Popular Culture Library. Call numbers for these books may be found in the BGSU Libraries Catalog or by clicking on a title below.

• Alice in Wonderland
• Beloved Son: a story of the Jesus Cults
• Bigger Than a Breadbox
• Bop Fables
• Chopped Up Chinese
• Curses! Or…How Never to be Foiled Again
• Dialogues in Americanism, 1964
• Dumbth and 81 Ways to Make Americans Smarter, 1989 ed., 1998 ed.
• Explaining China
• Farm Labor Organizing 1905-1967, 1967
• A Flash of Swallows: New Poems
• Fourteen for Tonight, 1955
• The Funny Men
• Funny People
• The Girls on the l0th Floor and Other Stories
• God and the H-Bomb
• Ground is our Table
• How to be Funny: Discovering the Comic You
• How to Make a Speech
• Letter to a Conservative
• Mark It and Strike It: an Autobiography
• Meeting of Minds , 1978
• Meeting of Minds. Second Series, 1979
• Meeting of Minds: the complete scripts, with illustrations, of the amazingly successful PBS-TV series , 1989
• More Funny People
• Murder on the Glitter Box
• Not All Your Laughter, Not All Your Tears
• The Passionate Nonsmoker's Bill of Rights: The First Guide to Enacting Nonsmoking Legislation
• Princess Snip Snip and the Puppykittens
• The Public Hating: a Collection of Short Stories
• The Question Man
• Ripoff: a Look at Corruption in America
• Schmock-Schmock
• Steve Allen on the Bible, Religion and Morality , More Steve Allen on the Bible, Religion & Morality
• Steve Allen Song Book
• Steve Allen's Funny Songs
• The Talk Show Murders
• What to Say When It Rains
• Wry on the Rocks, 1956

Numerous LP albums and other sound recordings donated by Allen have been transferred to the Sound Recordings Archives at Bowling Green State University.