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=                         Edna_W._Underwood                          =
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                            Introduction
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Edna Worthley Underwood (January 1873 - June 14, 1961) was an American
author, poet, and translator.


                             Biography
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Born in Maine in January 1873, Edna Worthley received little education
as a child, attending school occasionally, only when her family moved
to Kansas in 1884. She undertook a program of extensive
self-instruction, learning Latin and several of the major European
languages. She began attendance at Garfield University in Wichita,
Kansas, but later transferred to University of Michigan in Ann Arbor,
where she received a B.A. in 1892.

Returning to Kansas, she taught at Arkansas City High School for three
years before being dismissed because she refused to give up reading
yellow-bound foreign-language books during her lunch hour, which her
superiors believed to be dime novels.

After marrying Earl Underwood in August 1897, Edna moved to Kansas
City and then to New York City. She immediately undertook various
literary activities including the composition of poetry, plays and
film scripts. Her first published book was a collaborative translation
of a work by Nikolai Gogol in 1903.

The first published book that bore Underwood's name as author was the
collection of short stories, 'A Book of Dear Dead Women' (1911). With
the sole exception of 'An Orchid of Asia', Underwood apparently wrote
no more short stories. In 1919, she published 'Letters from a Prairie
Garden', a collection of her letters to a famous artist who had
visited the mid-West and undertaken a correspondence with her.

Underwood had published a book of poetry, 'The Garden of Desire'
(1913) but then turned to the writing of, for the most part,
historical novels, drawing heavily upon the languages she had learned,
the extensive travel she had undertaken, and her thorough grounding in
history. 'The Whirlwind' (1918) is about Catherine II of Russia. It
was followed by 'The Penitent' (1922), about Alexander I; 'The Passion
Flower' (1924), about Nicholas I and Alexander Pushkin. 'The
Pageant-Maker' was a novel planned but never completed or published.
These novels gained favourable reviews, but by the late 1920s
Underwood turned principally to poetry and translation. She had
already issued translations from Polish ('Sonnets from the Crimea',
1917) and other Slavic languages ('Short Stories from the Balkans',
1919), as well as translations from Persian ('Songs of Hafiz', 1917)
and Japanese ('Moons of Nippon', 1919). She then made several
translations from the Chinese, including the eighth-century poet Tu Fu
(now rendered as Du Fu); these translations were made in collaboration
with Chi-Hwang Chu.

By the early 1930s she had turned to translating from the Spanish,
including poets of Mexico, Haiti, and South America. She received wide
recognition for her translations. The Latin American Institute of
Culture of Buenos Aires awarded her the gold insignia for her 'Poets
of Haiti' (1935). Also, her translation of 'The Spirit of the Andes'
(1935), by the Peruvian poet Jose Santos Chocano, was dedicated by
special permission to Alfonso XIII of Spain.

By 1940 Underwood appears to have given up her literary endeavours.
She entered a sanatorium in 1953 suffering from dementia. She died on
June 14, 1961.

Underwood's papers are collected at the Library of Kansas State
University.


                          Further reading
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*Carol Ward Craine, 'Mrs Underwood: Linguist, Littérateuse', 1965
*Introduction by S.T. Joshi to 'Dear Dead Women', Tartarus Press, 2010


                           External links
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Original Article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edna_W._Underwood