Steve Allen has appropriately been termed television’s renaissance man. He hosted numerous television programs, appeared in several motion pictures, wrote more than 50 books, and composed several thousand songs. He once won a $1,000 bet that he could not compose 50 songs a day for a week.

Allen began his career as a radio announcer in 1942. In 1946 he joined the Mutual Broadcasting System as a comedian and two years later signed with CBS as a late-night disc jockey on KNX in Hollywood. He first gained national attention during the summer of 1950, when his program was booked as a 13-week substitute for Our Miss Brooks. This break led to his first television program, The Steve Allen Show, which debuted on Christmas Day 1950 on CBS. The show was later moved to Thursday nights, where it alternated with the popular Amos ’n’ Andy Show.

In 1954 Allen began hosting a daily late-night show on NBC, The Tonight Show. During the next three years, he introduced many television innovations that have since been continued by his successors. Most of these inventions involved his audience. Using a hand microphone, he went into the audience to talk with individuals; he answered questions submitted by the audience; members of the audience would attempt to “stump the band” by requesting songs the band could not play. Allen involved his announcer, Gene Rayburn, in nightly chitchat, and he spoke with the band leaders, Skitch Henderson and Bobby Byrne. These techniques epitomized Allen’s belief that “people will laugh at things that happen before their eyes much more readily than they will at incidents they’re merely told about.”

In 1956 Allen became a part-time host on Tonight because he was appearing in a new version of The Steve Allen Show. Still on NBC, he was now scheduled on Sunday nights, opposite The Ed Sullivan Show on CBS. Thus began one of the most famous ratings wars in television history. Allen and Sullivan were perhaps as distinct from one another as two men could be. Allen was a witty, innovative performer, willing to try virtually anything. Sullivan was a stiff master of ceremonies, who compelled his guests to conform to rigid standards of decorum. Although Allen occasionally re ceived higher ratings, Sullivan eventually won the war, and after the 1960 season NBC moved The Steve Allen Show to Mondays. A year later, Allen took the show into syndication and continued for three more years. From 1964 to 1967, he hosted the highly successful game show I’ve Got a Secret on CBS.

Steve Allen’s most innovative television offering was Meeting of Minds. The format was an hour-long dramatized discussion of social issues. Allen would act as the moderator accompanied in this imaginative ex- ercise by his “guests”: historical characters such as Galileo, Attila the Hun, Charles Darwin, Aristotle, Hegel, or Dostoevski. The idea for this program came in 1960, following Allen’s reading of Mortimer Adler’s The Syntopicon. Rejected by the major networks, the series was accepted by PBS in 1977 and ran until 1981.

During his long career as an entertainer, Allen developed a reputation as a social activist. He considered running for Congress as a Democrat from California, he actively opposed capital punishment, and he openly supported the controversial comedian Lenny Bruce. He wrote about the plight of migrant farm workers in The Ground Is Our Table (1966), discussed what he considered the collapse of ethics in the United States in Ripoff: The Corruption That Plagues America (1979), and, in a book finished just before his death, evaluated the state of popular culture in Vulgarians at the Gate: Raising the Standards of Popular Culture (2001). In the last years of his life Allen appeared only occasionally on television, spending a larger portion of his time operating Meadowlane Music and Rosemeadow Publishing, located in Van Nuys, California. Allen died in October 2000.