Printmaker, book and graphic designer, and educator Dorothy Allen was born Dorothy Caswell in Linton, Indiana, on May 25, 1908. Her family relocated to Modesto, California when Dorothy was a child and she would go on to attend Modesto Junior College, UC Berkeley, and San Francisco State Teachers College. She taught in Bay Area grammar schools throughout the 1930s, and in 1932, she married artist and designer Lewis Allen, with whom she would found the Allen Press, a fine book design and printing business in the San Francisco Bay Area. Dorothy Allen died on April 3, 2006, in San Jose, California.