Samuel Washington Allen (1917–2015), who also wrote under the pseudonym Paul Vesey, is the author of four books of poems: Elfenbeinzahne: Gedichte eines Afroamerikaners (bilingual edition in English and German, Heidleberg, Germany: Wolfang Rothe 1956), Ivory Tusks and Other Poems (New York: Poets Press, 1968), Paul Vesey’s Ledger (Detroit: Broadside Press, 1975), and Every Round and Other Poems (Detroit: Lotus Press, 1987). He edited Poems from Africa (New York: Crowell, 1973), and translated Jean Paul Sartre’s Jean-Paul Sartre’s Orphee Noir and Leopold Senghor’s Anthologie de la Nouvelle Poesie Negre from French into English.
Allen was born in Columbus, Ohio and his father was a clergyman. Allen attended Fiske University where he studied with James Weldon Johnson. He received his degree from Fiske in 1938 and went on to study law at Harvard where he received his law degree in 1941. He later did graduate work at the the New School for Social Research (1947–1948) and the Sorbonne in Paris (1949–1950).
In 1961, he was appointed to the position of Assistant General Counsel of the United States Information Agency and served in that position until 1964. He was then named Chief Counsel of the Community Relations Service in Washington, DC, a position he occupied from 1965 to 1968. In 1968, he was named Avalon Professor of Humanities at the Tuskegee Institute, where he taught for two years. In 1971 he became a Professor of English at Boston University where he taught until he retired in 1981. Allen also taught at Wesleyan University (1970-1971) and was Writer-in-Residence at Tuskegee University and at Rutgers University.