Author, Lawyer, U.S. Consul, and Founder of the Atlantic Monthly. Underwood was at Amherst College in Massachusetts for one year, being forced to leave due to financial constraints. He then went to Kentucky, where he was a teacher, studied law, and was eventually admitted to the practice of law. In Kentucky, he met and married Mary Louisa Wood, and in 1850 they returned to the north, settling in Boston, Massachusetts, where he became clerk of the Massachusetts Senate in 1852. He served on the Boston school board for thirteen years. Strongly anti-slavery in his views, Underwood sought to bring together like-minded New England literary figures to found a new literary magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, which would serve as their platform in the abolitionist movement. Though he was encouraged to become the editor, he felt a more well-known man, James Russell Lowell, should take the head position, and he became the assistant editor. Through this enterprise he became acquainted with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and others. After retiring from the Atlantic in 1859, he was elected clerk at the superior court at Boston, a position he held for eleven years. He then returned to his literary work until 1885, when President Grover Cleveland named him the U. S. consul to Glasgow, Scotland. While in Glasgow, he presented a series of lectures on “American Men of Letters,” and in 1888, he was awarded the LL.D. (Doctor of Laws) degree from the University of Glasgow. Upon his retirement from the position of consul, he became involved in literary work once again until 1893, when Cleveland appointed him consul to Edinburgh.