Henry Wilson Allen

He used several different pseudonyms for his works. His 50+ novels of the American West were published under the pen names Will Henry and Clay Fisher. Allen's screenplays and scripts for animated shorts were credited to Heck Allen and Henry Allen.

Henry Wilson Allen was born in Kansas City, Missouri. His older brother Robert Allen was an animator who worked for MGM. Before he began his writing career he worked variously as a stablehand, shop clerk, and gold miner.

In 1937 he began working as a contract screenwriter for the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cartoon studio. 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 that he co-wrote with Ben Hardaway including Wet Blanket Policy and Wild and Woody!. 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.

Allen died of pneumonia on October 26, 1991, in Van Nuys, California. He was 79.

"The wishbone will never replace the backbone."