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Show Renascence at the University 57 editorial board her first three years (1919-1922), during her senior year she was editor of Pen, putting out three issues. She prizes with some of her poems and also wrote a prize-win ning one-act play, "The Return," which was published in The won Pen. The play dealt with an episode in the anteroom of a doc tor's office in which a young woman about to be married comes to see the doctor about her fiance, who has been seriously injured in an automobile accident. The fiance's condition is crit ical; he will be helpless if he survives. When the doctor finally is able to report that her friend is dead, she sobs, "Thank God, oh, thank God!'" It is interesting that the same issue of The Pen included a prize poem by Phyllis McGinley, who later published six books of poetry, one of which won the Pulitzer Prize. McGinley followed Madelyn as editor. Others who contributed to The Pen with Madelyn were Fawn McKay (Brodie), Maureen Whipple, Kate Thomas, Vardis Fisher, Dilworth Woolley, and Maydel Cazier (Palmer). All of them later achieved distinction-Brodie as a biographer, Whipple and Fisher as novelists, Thomas as a teacher and poet, Woolley as an attorney, and Palmer as a Canadian woman's rights activist. Another associate, Alice Hunter (Redd), a life-long friend, is mentioned in Chapter XII. Madelyn also published "Onions," a play about a girl who returns home and came to love boys while peeling onions. In 1920 she also sold two articles published in The Young Women's Journal: "A Laugh" and "Soul Windows." Two oth ers, published in 1921, were "Why, Oh Why?" and "The Cycle of Life.?" Also in 1921 Madelyn submitted "Quaking Asps" to the Harper's Magazine Short Story Contest and received Honorable Mention. She considered seriously writing under a pen name, and chose "Elyn Ewart," but we have not found any thing bearing this signature. As a result of her university classes, Madelyn developed a special interest in the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Vincent, as Millay's friends called her, showed talent for writing poetry when she was young, and at the age of nineteen wrote "Renascence," a long assertive poem of youthful questioning and resolution which she entered in an anthology contest. The |
