Robert Underwood Johnson

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Robert Underwood Johnson (January 12, 1853 – October 14, 1937) was a U.S. writer and diplomat.

A native of Washington, D.C., Underwood joined the staff of the Century Magazine in 1873. He became the magazine's associate editor in 1881, and in 1909, on the death of Richard Watson Gilder, succeeded to the editorial chair, which he occupied until May 1913. Johnson was also a longtime writer and editor for Scribner's Monthly.

Underwood became noted early for his work on international copyright. As secretary of the American Copyright League, he helped get the Law of 1891 passed, for which he was decorated by the French and Italian governments.

He had a hand in many important publishing undertakings, and it was on his persuasion that Ulysses S. Grant wrote his Memoirs. He became permanent secretary of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

He was a driving force for the effort to acquire and preserve as a museum the rooms in Rome where the poet John Keats and his friend Joseph Severn spent Keats's final months in 1821. You can visit this Keats Shelley Memorial in Rome today, where its windows look out over the Spanish Steps.

In 1917 he organized and was chairman of the American Poets' Ambulance in Italy. This organization presented 112 ambulances to the Italian army in four months. In 1918-19 he was president of the New York Committee of the Italian War Relief Fund of America. He served as the U.S. Ambassador to Italy from April 1920 to July 1921, and represented the United States as observer at the Sanremo conference of the Supreme Council of the League. He was decorated by the Italian government in recognition of his work in behalf of good relations between Italy and the United States.

Writings

with C. C. Buel, Battles and Leaders of the Civil War (1887-88)
The Winter Hour and Other Poems (New York: The Century, 1892).
Songs of Liberty and Other Poems (New York: The Century, 1897).
Poems (New York: The Century, 1902).
Saint Gaudens: An Ode (third edition, 1910)
Saint Gaudens: An Ode (fourth edition, 1914)
Poems of War and Peace (1916)
Italian Rhapsody and Other Poems of Italy (1917)
Collected Poems, 1881-1919 (New Haven: Yale University, 1920).
Remembered Yesterdays (Boston: Little, Brown, 1923).
Your Hall of Fame: Being an Account of the Origin, Establishment, and History of This Division of New York University, from 1900 to 1935 inclusive (New York: New York University, 1935).

This article incorporates text from an edition of the New International Encyclopedia that is in the public domain.

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