One-Acts Published in Periodicals.New York: G. K.
Hall & Co., 1996.Underwood, Edna Worthley (1873–1961)
A gifted linguist, novelist, translator, and mentor
who became best known for her English transla-
tions of foreign works. Born in Phillips, Maine, Un-
derwood was raised in Arkansas City, Kansas. Her
parents, Albert and Alice Howard Worthley, were
committed to her intellectual advancement and
provided private tutors for her. By 1888, the year
in which she graduated from high school, Worthley
had already prepared the bulk of an anthology on
Slav literature that she planned to publish. Follow-
ing her graduating from the University of Michigan
in Ann Arbor in 1892, she returned to Kansas. In
1897 she married Robert Earl Underwood. In 1904
the couple decided to relocate to NEWYORKCITY.
Underwood’s career is impressive for the sheer
scope of her literary endeavors. From 1921 through
1938, she published fiction, poetry, and numerous
English translations that included detailed bio-
graphical and contextual information about the
work and the author. Her impressive translations
included a 1903 edition of Evenings in Little Russia
by Nikolai Gogol; Moons of Nippon,a 1917 edition
of Japanese poetry; the Anthology of Mexican Poets
(1932), which was the first English translation ever
published of Mexican poetry; Flemish Short Stories
(1934); and The Poets of Haiti, 1782–1934(1934),
which included a glossary of terms and a set of
woodcut images. In addition, Underwood pro-
duced a variety of her own creative writings in the
early years of the Harlem Renaissance. These in-
cluded The Garden of Desire: Love Sonnets to a
Spanish Monk(1913), Book of the White Peacocks
(1915), and The Whirlwind: A Novel of the Russian
18th Century(1919). She also published a trilogy of
novels set in 19th-century Russia: The Penitent
(1923), The Passion Flower(1924), and The Pageant
Maker(1926).
Underwood represented the dynamic range in
intellectual interests and creative production that
African Americans could produce and were pro-
ducing during the Harlem Renaissance. She was
one of the nine judges who served in the first OP-
PORTUNITYliterary contest, and her own work was
included in the rich 1927 anthology EBONY AND
TOPAZ:A COLLECTANEA, edited by CHARLES
JOHNSONand published by the NATIONALURBAN
LEAGUE.
Underwood, who had been widowed since
1944, died in June 1961 in her hometown of
Arkansas City, Kansas.Bibliography
Underwood, Edna. Anthology of Mexican Poets from the
Earliest Times to the Present Day.Portland, Maine:
The Mosher Press, 1932.
———. Short Stories From the Balkans, Translated into
English by Edna Worthley Underwood.Boston: Mar-
shall Jones Company, 1919.
———. The Slav Anthology: Russian, Polish, Bohemian,
Serbian, Croatian, Translated by Edna Worthley Un-
derwood.Portland, Maine: The Mosher Press, 1931.
———. The Taste of Honey: The Notebook of a Linguist.
Portland, Maine: The Mosher Press, 1930.“Unfinished Masterpieces”Anita Scott
Coleman(1927)
A meditative short story about life experiences and
the passage of time by prize-winning writer ANITA
SCOTTCOLEMAN. Published in the March 1927
issue of THECRISIS,the story proceeds in the fash-
ion of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol(1868)
as an omniscient narrator considers the past en-
counters and the value of reminiscence. “Back-
ward ho, through the mazes of the past,” declares
the narrator, who then proceeds to focus on two
individuals whom the invisible and unnamed pro-
tagonist has known. Coleman presents first Dora
Johns, a child who, despite the lack in her life
“seem[ed] not to heed the seething bubbles upon
the other side” and could often be found “shaping,
shaping marvelous things out of mud.” The narra-
tor concludes that Dora, a true innocent, is one of
the “Master’s unfinished shapes which He will
some day gather to mould anew into the unfin-
ished masterpiece.” The second individual featured
in the story is Mr. William Williams, a 51-year-old
man who “wear[s] a child’s simplicity, the sort that
is so sad to see upon a man.” More concerned with
gambling money than investing it, Williams is a
“lump of mud,” one who has not been shaped and
for whom death, or the “gathering up,” will provide
the only opportunity to “be moulded anew into the“Unfinished Masterpieces” 535