Author: Willis, John Howard
Biography:
WILLIS, John Howard (1802-47: ancestry.com)
Willis was born in Montreal, the son of Mary (Howard) and Robert Willis. His father was serving as barrack-master at Lachine at the time of his death in 1826. Willis began contributing poems to newspapers, sometimes under a version of his initials or using the pseudonym "Long Tom Coffin," late in 1824. He was popular enough as a newspaper poet that a bookseller paid him for the copyright of the collection of mostly reprinted poems that appeared in 1831. It was his only book, though he had distributed proposals for a work to be entitled "The Woman Hater" in 1828. He was also an artist: the McCord Museum of Canadian History holds some of his watercolour paintings of indigenous subjects. He worked as a clerk in the Commissariat Department in Quebec City and died there, possibly of typhus, on 2 July 1847. His wife Julia Hannah Willis had died two years earlier; there is no record of children. MacDonald supplies a substantial list of poems published in Canadian newspapers not included in the volume of Scraps and Sketches. On at least one occasion in 1838, Willis was also commissioned to write for a US publication, Godey's Lady's Book. (ancestry.com 11 Feb. 2021; WorldCat; Mary Lu MacDonald, "Three Early Canadian Poets," Canadian Poetry 17 [1985]; musee-mccord.qc.ca) HJ
Other Names:
- J. H. Willis