Nathaniel Parker Willis
Nathaniel Parker Willis (January 20, 1806 - January 20, 1867) was an American author and editor who had worked with notable American writers including Harriet Jacobs and Edgar Allan Poe. Life and careerWillis was descended from George Willis, a Puritan who arrived in New England about 1630 and settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Nathaniel Parker was born in Portland, Maine the eldest son and second child of Nathaniel Willis, a newspaper proprietor in Boston. His younger sister was Sara Willis Parton, a writer who used the pseudonym Fanny Fern. After attending Boston grammar school and Phillips Academy at Andover, Nathaniel Parker Willis entered Yale College in October 1823. Although he did not specially distinguish himself as a student, university life had considerable influence in the development of his character, and furnished him with much of his literary material. Immediately after leaving Yale he published in 1827 a volume of poetical Sketches. It was followed by Fugitive Poetry (1829) and another volume of verse (1831). Willis contributed frequently to magazines and periodicals. In 1829 he started the American Monthly Magazine, which was continued from April of that year to August 1831. On its discontinuance he went to Europe as foreign editor and correspondent of the New York Mirror. To this journal he contributed a series of letters, which, under the title Pencillings by the Way, were published at London in 1835 (3 vols, Philadelphia, 1836, 2 vols; and first complete edition, New York, 1841). Their vivid and rapid sketches of scenes and modes of life in that part of the world at once gained them a wide popularity; but he was censured by some critics for indiscretion in reporting conversations in private gatherings, and at one point fought a bloodless duel with Captain Marryat, then editor of the Metropolitan Magazine. His "Slingsby Papers," a series of magazine articles descriptive of American life and adventure, republished in 1836 under the title Inklings of Adventure, were as successful in England as were his Pencillings by the Way in America. He also published while in England Melanie and other Poems (London, 1835; New York, 1837), which was introduced by a preface by Barry Cornwall (Procter). After his marriage to Mary Stace, daughter of General William Stace of Woolwich, he returned to America, and settled at a small estate on Oswego Creek in New York, just above its junction with the Susquehanna River. Here he lived off and on from 1837 to 1842, and wrote Letters from under a Bridge (London, 1840; first complete edition, New York, 1844). During a short visit to England in 1839-1840 he published Two Ways of Dying for a Husband. Returning to New York City, he established, along with George Pope Morris, a newspaper entitled the Evening Mirror in 1844. By this time, Willis was a popular writer (a joke was that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was Germany's version of N.P. Willis) and one of the first commercially-successful magazine writers in America.[1] His wife Mary died in childbirth in 1845.[2] In the spring of 1846, he married Cornelia Grinnell, and established the National Press, afterwards named the Home Journal. He edited the Home Journal until his death in 1867. The Home Journal was re-named Town & Country in 1901, and it is still published today. In 1845 he published Dashes at Life with a Free Pencil, in 1846 a collected edition of his Prose and Poetical Works, in 1849 Rural Letters, and in 1850 Life Here and There. In that year he settled at Idlewild on the Hudson River and on account of failing health spent the remainder of his life chiefly in retirement. In 1852, Willis travelled to Mammoth Cave, Kentucky where he met Stephen Bishop, a mulatto slave guide, who had singlehandedly doubled the known extent of what proved to be the longest cave in the world. By paying Stephen's owner for the privilege of a personal, Stephen-guided trip through the cave to see the eyeless fish of Echo River, Willis gained the opportunity to ask Bishop, point-blank, for his opinions on slavery. Due to Willis' careful candor, Mammoth Cave historians have a valuable literary clue in the sparse history of one of the cave's most celebrated, but least understood figures. For this reason, Willis is a "once-removed" hero to central Kentucky cave explorers. Willis' account may be found in the article on Stephen Bishop. Among his later works were Hurry-Graphs (1851), Outdoors at Idlewild (1854), Ragbag (1855), Paul Fane (1856), and the Convalescent (1859), but he had survived his great reputation. He died on the 20th of January 1867, and was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery near Boston. Harriet JacobsWillis should perhaps be best remembered as the employer between the years of 1842 and 1860 (at least) of Harriet Jacobs, whose autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl written while she was a nursemaid at Idlewild, is one of the glories of American literature. It should also be noted that, according to Jean Fagan Yellin, Jacobs "was convinced that, unlike both his wives, Nathaniel Parker Willis was proslavery." [3] Edgar Allan PoeWhile Willis was editor of the Evening Mirror, it was the first to publish Poe's magnum opus poem "The Raven" in its January 29, 1845 issue. In his introduction, Willis called it "unsurpassed in English poetry for subtle conception, masterly ingenuity of versification, and consistent, sustaining of imaginative lift... It will stick to the memory of everybody who reads it."[4] Willis and Poe were close friends, and Willis helped Poe financially after his wife Virginia became ill and Poe was suing Thomas Dunn English for libel.[5] Willis often tried to pursuade Poe to be less destructive in his criticism and concentrate on his own poetry.[6]. Even so, Willis published many pieces of what would later be referred to as "The Longfellow War," a literary battle between Poe and the supporters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who Poe called overrated and guilty of plagiarism.[7] Willis also introduced Poe to Fanny Osgood; the two would later carry out a very public literary flirtation.[8] Character and apperanceWillis was well-liked and known for his good nature amongst friends. Well-traveled and clever (just as in his writing, which made heavy use of puns and humor), he had a striking appearance at six feet tall and elegantly dressed. Many, however, remarked that Willis was effiminate, Europeanized, and guilty of "Miss Nancyism." One editor called him "an impersonal passive verb - a pronoun of the feminine gender."[9] Further readingBaker, Thomas N. Nathaniel Parker Willis and the Trials of Literary Fame. New York, Oxford University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-19-512073-6 References
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. External links |
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