Author: Willis, Nathaniel Parker
Biography:
WILLIS, Nathaniel Parker (1806-67: ancestry.com)
As Appleton says, Willis "came of a race of printers and publishers." His great-grandfather Willis was a printer in Boston, his grandfather a newspaper proprietor, and his father the founder and editor of several successful papers. He himself was born in Portland ME, son of Hannah (Parker) and Nathaniel Willis. At least two of his siblings, a sister and a brother, also became writers. The family moved to Boston where he attended the Latin School and then went to Yale (Class of 1827); he published his first poems in his father's Recorder (not Advertiser as sometimes given) during his student days. After graduating, he returned to Boston and began a lucrative career as a journalist and editor. He founded the American Monthly Magazine (1829-31), then moved to New York and entered into partnership with George Pope Morris of the New York Mirror. He travelled to Europe as an overseas correspondent for the Mirror1831-6 and reprinted many of his articles in book form in 1835 as Pencillings by the Way. In England in 1835 he married Mary Stace (1816-45) and had at least one surviving child with her, but she died in childbirth ten years later and the new baby also. In 1846 he married Cornelia Grinnell (1825-1904); they had four children and built a house together that they named Idlewild, on the banks of the Hudson River near Cornwall. Willis was a hard-working editor and a popular writer of verse and prose, especially the shorter forms suitable for magazines and collections--tales, travel sketches, light social profiles--but he also wrote one novel (Paul Fane, 1857) and two historical dramas that were performed in New York in 1839. He has been described as the highest-paid magazine writer in the country when he was at the peak of his professional career. (According to ANBO, his income from writing in 1842 was $4800.) He died at Idlewild after suffering seizures and paralysis, and is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge MA. (ancestry.com 11 Feb. 2021; ANBO 11 Feb. 2021; Appleton) HJ
Other Names:
- N. P. Willis