Willis, NATHANIEL PARKER

Willis, NATHANIEL PARKER, American author, was born at Portland, Maine, January 20, 1806. He came of a race of printers and publishers; his father founded the Youth's Companion (1827), which is still issued. Educated at Yale, on the completion of his college course, and after issuing several volumes of poetry, he established the American Monthly Magazine, afterwards merged in the New York Mirror, in which he was associated with George P. Morris. In 1831 he visited Europe, and contributed to the Mirror his Pencillings by the Way. Appointed attaché to the American legation at Paris, he had favourable opportunities for observing European society, and after a visit to Greece and Turkey returned to England in 1837, and married a daughter of a British officer, General Stace. He contributed to the London New Monthly his Inklings of Adventure (republished 1836), and returned to New York and published Letters from under a Bridge (1840). In 1844 he engaged with General Morris in editing the Daily Mirror, his wife died, and he revisited Europe, and published Dashes at Life with a Free Pencil (1845); returned to New York in 1846, he married a daughter of the Hon. Joseph Grinnell of New Bedford, and with his former partner established the Home Journal, to which he contributed most of the following works, also published in a collected form: in 1850, People I have Met and Life Here and There; 1851, Hurry-graphs, Memoranda of a Life of Jenny Lind; 1853, Fun Jottings, A Summer Cruise in the Mediterranean; 1854, A Health-trip to the Tropics, Famous Persons and Places, Outdoors at Idlewild; 1855, The Rag-bag; 1857, Paul Fane; 1859, The Convalescent. Thackeray contributed to his paper the Mirror. Much of this work was done during a long, brave struggle with what appeared to be consumptive disease. Mr Willis was an observant and thoughtful writer, discursive, fragmentary, picturesque, sprightly, quaint, and graceful, full of elaborate ease and ingenious spontaneity. He died at Idlewild, near Cornwall-on-the-Hudson, January 20, 1867. See Life in 'American Men of Letters' series (1885), by H. A. Beers, who also edited Selections from his prose-writings (1885).—His sister, SARA PAYSON WILLIS (1811-72), was a popular writer under the pen-name of 'Fanny Fern.' See Fanny Fern, a Memorial Volume (1873), by her husband, James Parton, an industrious journalist and compiler (born 1822).