Nathaniel Parker Willis Totally Explained

Everything about Nathaniel Parker Willis totally explained

Nathaniel Parker Willis, also known as N. P. Willis, (January 20, 1806 – January 20, 1867) was an American author, poet and editor who worked with several notable American writers including Edgar Allan Poe and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. For a time, he was the employer of Harriet Jacobs. His brother was Richard Storr Willis and his sister wrote under the name Fanny Fern.
Born in Portland, Maine, Willis came from a family of publishers. His grandfather owned newspapers in Massachusetts and in Virginia and his father was the founder of Youth's Companion, the first newspaper specifically for children. Willis developed an interest in literature while attending Yale College and began publishing poetry. After graduation, he worked as an overseas correspondent for the New York Mirror. He eventually moved to New York and began to build his literary reputation. Working with multiple publications, he soon became the highest-paid magazine writer in America, earning about $100 per article and $5,000 per year. In 1846, he started his own publication, the Home Journal, which is still published today as Town & Country. Shortly after, Willis moved to a home on the Hudson River where he lived a semi-retired life until his death in 1867.
Willis had boosted his popularity thanks to his good nature, though he was occasionally noted for being effeminate and Europeanized. As a publisher, he tried to appeal to the taste of the readers while supporting new talent. In addition to travel writings, Willis published several poems, tales, and a play. Despite his intense popularity for a time, at his death Willis was nearly forgotten.

Life and career

Early life and family

Nathaniel Parker Willis was born January 20, 1806 in Portland, Maine. His father Nathaniel Willis was a newspaper proprietor there and his grandfather owned newspapers in Boston, Massachusetts and western Virginia. A more distant ancestor, George Willis, was a Puritan who arrived in New England about 1630 and settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Willis's younger sister was Sara Willis Parton, who would later become a writer under the pseudonym Fanny Fern, and a brother, Richard Storr Willis, who went on to become a musician and music journalist, also known as the writer of the melody for "It Came Upon the Midnight Clear".
In 1816, the family moved to Boston, where Willis's father established the Boston Recorder and, nine years later, the Youth's Companion, the world's first newspaper for children. The elder Willis's emphasis on religious themes earned him the nickname "Deacon" Willis. Willis credited Bushnell with teaching him the proper technique for sharpening a razor by "drawing it from heel to point both ways... the two cross frictions correct each other". At Yale, he further developed an interest in literature, often neglecting his other studies. and began publishing poetry in his father's Boston Periodical, often using one of two literary personalities under the pen names "Roy" (for religious subjects) and "Cassius" (for more secular topics).

Literary carer

Willis began contributing more frequently to magazines and periodicals. In 1829 he founded the American Monthly Magazine, The romantic descriptions of scenes and modes of life in Europe sold well despite the high price tag of $7 a copy. The work became popular and boosted Willis's literary reputation enough that an American edition was soon issued.
   Despite this popularity, he was censured by some critics for indiscretion in reporting private conversations. At one point he fought a bloodless duel with Captain Frederick Marryat, then editor of the Metropolitan Magazine. Marryat was upset after Willis had sent a private letter to George Pope Morris, who had it printed. Still, in 1835 Willis was popular enough to introduce Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to important literary figures in England, including Ada Byron, daughter of Lord Byron.
   While abroad, Willis wrote to a friend, "I should like to marry in England." He soon married Mary Stace, daughter of General William Stace of Woolwich, on October 1, 1835, after a month-long engagement. The couple took a two-week honeymoon in Paris.
   In 1837, Willis and his wife returned to the United States and settled at a small estate on Owego Creek in New York, just above its junction with the Susquehanna River. He named the home Glenmary and the rural setting inspired him to write Letters from under a Bridge. On October 20, 1838, Willis began a series of articles called "A New Series of Letters from London", one of which suggested an illicit relationship between writer Letitia Elizabeth Landon and editor William Jordan. The article caused some scandal, for which Willis's publisher had to apologize.
   On June 20, 1839, Willis's play Tortesa, the Usurer premiered in Philadelphia at the Walnut Street Theatre. Edgar Allan Poe called it "by far the best play from the pen of an American author." During a short visit to England in 1839–1840 Willis published Two Ways of Dying for a Husband. His personal life was touched with grief when his first child was stillborn on December 4, 1840. He and Stace had a second daughter, Imogen, who was born June 20, 1842. Shortly thereafter, he attended a ball in honor of Charles Dickens in New York. After dancing with Dickens's wife, Willis and Dickens went out for "rum toddy and broiled oysters". Willis was invited to submit a weekly column to the Brother Johnathan, a weekly publication from New York with 20,000 subscribers, which he did until September 1841. By 1842, Willis was earning the unusually-high salary of $4,800 a year. As a later journalist remarked, this made Willis "the first magazine writer who was tolerably well paid."
   In 1842, Willis employed Harriet Jacobs as a house servant and nanny. She was an escaped slave from North Carolina and, when her owners sought to have her returned to their plantation, Willis bought her freedom. Nearly two decades later, Jacobs would write in her fictionalized autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl that she "was convinced that... Nathaniel Parker Willis was proslavery." In the book, Willis was depicted as "Mr. Bruce", an unattractive Southern sympathizer.

Evening Mirror

Returning to New York City, he reorganized, along with George Pope Morris, the weekly New York Mirror as the daily Evening Mirror 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. In the fall of that year, he also was the first editor of the annual gift book The Opal founded by Rufus Wilmot Griswold. During this time, he became the highest-paid magazine writer in America, earning about $100 per article and $5,000 per year.
While 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." 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. Willis often tried to persuade Poe to be less destructive in his criticism and concentrate on his own poetry. 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. Willis also introduced Poe to Fanny Osgood; the two would later carry out a very public literary flirtation.
The Mirror flourished at a time when many publications were discontinuing. Its success was due to the shrewd management of Willis and Morris and the two demonstrated that the American public could support literary endeavors. Willis was becoming an expert in American literature and so, in 1845, Willis and Morris issued an anthology, The Prose and Poetry of America. Willis's wife Mary Stace died in childbirth on March 25, 1845. Their daughter, Blanche, died as well and Willis wrote in his note-book that she was "an angel without fault or foible". In October 1846, he married Cornelia Grinnell, a wealthy Quaker from New Bedford and the adopted daughter of a local Congressman.

Home Journal

In 1846, Willis and Morris left the Evening Mirror and attempted to edit a new weekly, the National Press, which was renamed to the Home Journal after eight months. Their prospectus for the new publication, published November 21, 1846, announced their intentions to create a magazine "to circle around the family table". He edited the Home Journal until his death in 1867. It was re-named Town & Country in 1901, and it's still published today. During Willis's time at the journal, he especially promoted women poets, including Frances Sargent Osgood, Anne Lynch Botta, Grace Greenwood, Julia Ward Howe and others. Willis and his editors favorably reviewed many works now considered important today, including Henry David Thoreau's Walden and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance.

Idlewild

In 1846 Willis settled near the banks of Canterbury Creek near the Hudson River in New York and named his new home Idlewild. When Willis first visited the property, the owners said it had little value and that it was "an idle wild of which nothing could ever be made". Because of failing health he spent the remainder of his life chiefly in retirement. His wife Cornelia was also recovering from a difficult illness after the birth of their first child together, Edith (born September 28, 1853), Bailey (born May 31, 1857), and a daughter that died only a few minutes after her birth on October 31, 1860.
   During these last years at Idlewild, Willis continued contributing a weekly letter to the Home Journal.
   In 1850, Willis was involved in the divorce suit between the actor Edwin Forrest and his wife Catherine. He and Catherine separated in April 1849 as a result. He moved to Philadelphia and filed for divorce in February 1850 though the Pennsylvania legislature denied his application. Catharine went to live with the family of Parke Godwin and the separation became a public affair, with newspapers throughout New York reporting on supposed infidelities and other gossip.
   Willis defended Catharine, who maintained her innocence, in the Home Journal and suggested that Forrest was merely jealous of her intellectual superiority. On June 17, 1850, shortly after Forrest had filed for divorce in the New York Supreme Court, Forrest beat Willis with a gutta-percha whip in New York's Washington Square, shouting "this man is the seducer of my wife". Willis, who was recovering from a rheumatic fever at the time, was unable to fight back. He later sued Forrest for assault and, by March 1852, was awarded $2,500 plus court costs.
   In 1852, Willis traveled to Mammoth Cave in 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.

Ruth Hall

Willis arbitrarily refused to print the work of his sister "Fanny Fern" after 1854. As Fanny Fern, Sarah had published Fern Leaves, which sold over 100,000 copies the year before Willis, however, wasn't encouraging of his sister's writings. "You overstrain the pathetic, and your humor runs into dreadful vulgarity sometimes... I'm sorry that any editor knows that a sister of mine wrote some of these which you sent me," he wrote. In 1854 she published Ruth Hall, a Domestic Tale of the Present Time, a barely concealed semi-autobiographical account of her own difficulties in the literary world. Nathaniel Willis was represented as "Hyacinth Ellet", an effeminate, self-serving editor who schemes to ruin his sister's prospects as a writer. Willis didn't publicly protest but in private he asserted that, despite his fictitious equivalent, he'd done his best to support his sister during her difficult times, especially after the death of her first husband.

Final years and death

In July 1860, Willis took his last major trip. Along with his wife, he stopped in Chicago and Yellow Springs, Ohio, as far west as Madison, Wisconsin, and also took a steamboat down the Mississippi River to St. Louis, Missouri, and returned through Cincinnati, Ohio and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 1851, Willis allowed the Home Journal to break its pledge to avoid political party when the Confederate States of America was established, calling the move a purposeful act to bring on war. On May 28, 1861, Willis was part of a committee of literary figures—including William Cullen Bryant, Charles Anderson Dana, and Horace Greeley—to invite Edward Everett to speak in New York on behalf of maintaining the Union.
Willis died on his sixty-first birthday, January 20, 1867, and was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Four days later, the day of his funeral, all bookstores in the city were closed as a token of respect.

Reputation

Willis was well-liked and known for his good nature amongst friends. Well-traveled and clever, he'd a striking appearance at six feet tall and was typically dressed elegantly. Many, however, remarked that Willis was effeminate, Europeanized, and guilty of "Miss Nancyism." One editor called him "an impersonal passive verb—a pronoun of the feminine gender." A contemporary caricature depicted him wearing a fashionable beaver hat and tightly-closed coat and carrying a cane, reflecting Willis's wide reputation as a "dandy". Publisher Charles Frederick Briggs once wrote that "Willis was too Willisy".
   Willis built up his reputation in the public at a time when readers were interested in the personal lives of writers. His travel writings in particular were popular for this reason. His informally-toned editorials which covered a variety of topics were also very successful.
   In the publishing world, Willis was known as a shrewd magazinist and an innovator who focused on appealing to readers' special interest while still recognizing new talent. In fact, Willis became the standard by which other magazinists were judged. "His gayety [sic] and his graceful fluency made him the first of our proper 'magazinists'" according to writer George William Curtis. For a time, it was said that Willis was the "most-talked-about author" in the United States. Minor Southern writer Joseph Beckham Cobb wrote: "No sane person, we're persuaded, can read his poetry".
   By 1850, with the publication of Hurry-Graphs, Willis was becoming a forgotten celebrity. In August 1853, future President James A. Garfield discussed Willis's declining popularity in his diary: "Willis is said to be a man, although an unrivaled poet. How strange that such men should go to ruin, when they might soar perpetually in the heaven of heavens."After Willis's death, obituaries reported that he'd outlived his fame. One remarked, "the man who withdraws from the whirling currents of active life is speedily forgotten." This obituary also stated that Americans "will ever remember and cherish Nathaniel P. Willis as one worthy to stand with Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving". As biographer Thomas N. Baker wrote, Willis is today only referred to as a footnote in relation to other authors. His final work was The Convalescent (1859), which included a chapter on his time spent with Washington Irving at Sunnyside.

Bibliography

Prose

Sketches (1827)
Pencillings by the Way (1835)
Inklings of Adventure (1836)
Rural Letters and Other Records of Thoughts at Leisure (1849) Plays
Bianca Visconti; or, The Heart Overtasked. A Tragedy in Five Acts (1839)
The Sacred Poems of N. P. Willis (1843)
Poems of Passion (184)
Lady Jane and Humorous Poems (1844)
The Poems, Sacred, Passionate, and Humorous (1868)

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