Nathaniel Parker Willis

Nathaniel Parker Willis was an American author, poet and editor. He worked with Edgar Allan Poe and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Willis was the highest-paid magazine writer of his day. His brother was the composer Richard Storrs Willis and his sister Sara wrote under the name Fanny Fern.

About Nathaniel Parker Willis in brief

Nathaniel Parker Willis was an American author, poet and editor. He worked with Edgar Allan Poe and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Willis was the highest-paid magazine writer of his day. His brother was the composer Richard Storrs Willis and his sister Sara wrote under the name Fanny Fern. Willis died in New York in 1867 and is buried in Mount Auburn, New York, with his wife and three children. He was the son of Nathaniel Willis, the founder of Youth’s Companion, the world’s first newspaper for children, and Hannah Willis, who was a journalist and mother of Harriet Jacobs, who wrote her autobiography while being employed as his children’s nurse. He also had a younger sister, Sara Willis Parton, who would later become a writer under the pseudonym Fanny. Willis published poetry in his father’s Boston Periodical, often using one of two literary personalities under the pen names ‘Roy’ and ‘Cassius’ In 1829, he served as editor for the gift book The Token, making him the only person to be editor in the book’s 15-year history besides its founder, Samuel Griswold Goodrich. That year, Willis founded the American Monthly Magazine, which began in April 1829 until it was discontinued in August 1831. He blamed its failure on its purses and moved to Europe to serve as foreign correspondent of the New York Mirror. In 1832, while in Florence, Italy, he met Horatio Greenough, who sculpted a bust of the writer. Willis’s work became popular and boosted his literary reputation. Despite his popularity, he was censured by some critics for some indiscured descriptions of life and scenes in Europe in 1835, which were later collected as Pencillings by the Way, a series of letters for the Mirror, about which he later wrote a book.

His sister in her novel Ruth Hall, occasionally described him as being effeminate and Europeanized. Willis also published several poems, tales, and a play. He died in a New York home on the Hudson River where he lived a semi-retired life until his death in 18 67. He is buried at Mount Auburn in New Jersey. He had a son, Richard StOrrs Willis, and two daughters, Lucy Douglas, Louisa Harris, Julia Dean, Mary Perry, Edward Payson, and Ellen Holmes. His father Nathaniel Willis was a newspaper proprietor there and his grandfather owned newspapers in Boston, Massachusetts and western Virginia. After attending a Boston grammar school and Phillips Academy at Andover, Nathaniel Parker Willis entered Yale College in October 1823 where he roomed with Horace Bushnell. He graduated in 1827 and spent time touring parts of the United States and Canada, with whom he would become a lifelong friend. His mother was Hannah Willis and it was her husband’s offer to edit the Eastern Argus in Maine that caused their move to Portland, Maine. His other siblings were Lucy Douglas, Louisa. Harris, Julia Dean, Mary Perry, Edward P Grayson, and Ellen. Holmes. In 1816, the family moved to Boston, where Willis’s father established the Boston Recorder.

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