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Heck Allen

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Henry Wilson "Heck" Allen (September 12, 1912 – October 26, 1991) was an American author and screenwriter. He was the younger brother of Robert Allen.

Biography[]

Allen's career first began with him working as a contract screenwriter for the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cartoon studio in 1937. While his early work was for Harman and Ising's Barney Bear series, his longest collaboration was with director Tex Avery. Allen was credited as story artist on many classic Avery shorts, included Swing Shift Cinderella, Northwest Hounded Police, and King-Size Canary, among many others. Allen downplayed his contributions to the shorts, claiming that Avery merely used him as a sounding board for his own ideas. He was later fired by Fred Quimby and went to work for Walter Lantz Productions on several Woody Woodpecker cartoons. Following the 1948 shutdown of Walter Lantz Productions, Allen returned to MGM and continued to write for Avery's cartoons that were released during the 1950s, including Little Johnny Jet, The Three Little Pups, and The First Bad Man.

Allen's career as a novelist began in 1950, with the publication of his first Western No Survivors. Allen, afraid that the studio would disapprove of his moonlighting, used a pen-name to avoid trouble. He would go on to publish over 50 novels, eight of which were adapted for the screen. Most of these were published under one or the other of the pseudonyms Will Henry and Clay Fisher. Allen was a five-time winner of the Spur Award from the Western Writers of America and a recipient of the Levi Strauss Award for lifetime achievement.

List of Shorts written by Heck Allen[]

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