H. Allen Smith was an American humorist whose books were popular in the 1940s and 1950s. He was born December 19, 1907, in McLeansboro, Illinois, where he lived until the age of six. His family moved to Decatur in 1913 and then to Defiance, Ohio, finally arriving in Huntington, Indiana. Smith dropped out of high school and began working odd jobs, eventually finding jobs as a journalist.

He began in 1922 at the Huntington Herald-Press, relocating in Jeffersonville, Indiana, and Louisville, Kentucky. In Florida, editing the Sebring American in 1925, he met society editor Nelle Mae Simpson, and they married in 1927. The couple lived in Oklahoma, where Smith worked at the Tulsa Tribune, followed by a position at the Denver Post. In 1929, he became a United Press rewrite man, also handling feature stories and celebrity interviews. He continued as a feature writer with the New York World-Telegram from 1934 to 1939. Oklahoma is a South Central state of the United States (with strong Southern, Western, and Midwestern influences) and its U.S. postal abbreviation is OK; others abbreviate the states name Okla. ... The Denver Post is a daily newspaper published in Denver, Colorado. ...

When his book Low Man on a Totem Pole (1941) became a WWII bestseller, he became a freelance writer. He scored again with Life in a Putty Knife Factory (1943) and Lost in the Horse Latitudes. His first novel, Rhubarb (1946), led to two sequels and a 1951 film adaptation. His other books included People Named Smith (1950), The Compleat Practical Joker (1953), Three Smiths in the Wind and Larks in the Popcorn. He collaborated with Ira L. Smith on Three men on Third and Low and Inside.

Smith was the editor of Desert Island Decameron, and he also wrote hundreds of articles for Reader’s Digest, The Saturday Evening Post, Playboy, Esquire and other magazines. He died February 24, 1976 in San Francisco, and his last book, The Life and Legend of Gene Fowler was published in 1977. A cover of the Saturday Evening Post from 1903 The Saturday Evening Post was a weekly magazine published in the United States from August 4, 1821 to February 8, 1969. ... This page is a candidate for speedy deletion. ...

External link

• H. Allen Smith's "Nobody Knows More About Chili Than I Do"