Cartoonist
American cartoonist born in Fayette County, Kentucky, around 1870. T.S. Allen was raised in Kentucky, attended James Kane Allen’s school, was a classmate of William H. Walker (later a stablemate at Life magazine) and graduated from Transylvania University in Lexington, where he studied classical languages. In the 1890s Allen moved to New York, where his father had established a law office, and worked there as a clerk. He moonlighted as an author and joke writer for magazine cartoonists and eventually sketched his own drawings to accompany his breezy captions.
Allen’s style—obviously untutored, but showing shrewd native talent—was as flippant as his light jokes. He was among the first cartoonists to break away from the rigid illustrators’ look of magazine cartoons and was perceived as the American Phil May. Thematically, many of Allen’s single-panel cartoons dealt with street urchins and working-class or immigrant subjects.
When the very first Sunday supplements were issued, in the days when there were as many text jokes and panel cartoons as strip series, T.S. Allen was a prominent fixture on both the World and Hearst sections. Otherwise Life was his major outlet well into the 1910s.
