Sicherman, Barbara and Green , Carol:Notable American Women: The Modern Period
- hardcover 2008, ISBN: 9781199799739
Baker and Scribner, New York, 1850. Hard Cover. Good/No Jacket. Light foxing on top page ridge, foxing on first few pages, a bit rubbed, owner ink & blind stamps on front endpaper. … More...
Baker and Scribner, New York, 1850. Hard Cover. Good/No Jacket. Light foxing on top page ridge, foxing on first few pages, a bit rubbed, owner ink & blind stamps on front endpaper. 1850 Hard Cover. xvi, 380 pp. Original decorative olive cloth, gilt titles. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: "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. He became the highest-paid magazine writer of his day. For a time, he was the employer of former slave and future writer Harriet Jacobs. His brother was the composer Richard Storrs 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 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 was earning about US$100 per article and between $5,000 and $10,000 per year. In 1846, he started his own publication, the Home Journal, which was eventually renamed 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 embedded his own personality into his writing and addressed his readers personally, specifically in his travel writings, so that his reputation was built in part because of his character. Critics, including his sister in her novel Ruth Hall, occasionally described him as being effeminate and Europeanized. Willis also published several poems, tales, and a play. Despite his intense popularity for a time, at his death Willis was nearly forgotten. In the latter part of the 1820s, Willis began contributing more frequently to magazines and periodicals. 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 publishing in April 1829 until it was discontinued in August 1831. He blamed its failure on the 'tight purses of Boston culture' and moved to Europe to serve as foreign editor and correspondent of the New York Mirror. In 1832, while in Florence, Italy, he met Horatio Greenough, who sculpted a bust of the writer. Between 1832 and 1836, Willis contributed a series of letters for the Mirror, about half of which were later collected as Pencillings by the Way, printed in London in 1835. The romantic descriptions of scenes and modes of life in Europe sold well despite the then 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, after Willis sent a private letter of Marryat's 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. The couple moved to London where, in 1836, Willis met Charles Dickens, who was working for the Morning Chronicle at the time. 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 200-acre (0.81 km2) 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'. That year, he was also editor of the short-lived periodical The Corsair, for which he enlisted William Makepeace Thackery to write short sketches of France. Another major work, Two Ways of Dying for a Husband, was published in England during a short visit there in 1839–1840. Shortly after returning to the United States, 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. Later that year, Willis 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'. By this time, his fame had grown enough that he was often invited to lecture and recite poetry, including his presentation to the Linonian Society at Yale on August 17, 1841. Willis was invited to submit a column to the each weekly issue of Brother Johnathan, a 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, an escaped slave from North Carolina, as a house servant and nanny. When her owners sought to have her returned to their plantation, Willis's wife bought her freedom for $300. Nearly two decades later, Jacobs would write in her fictionalized autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, which she began composing while while working for the Willis family, that she 'was convinced that... Nathaniel Parker Willis was proslavery'. Willis is depicted as 'Mr. Bruce', an unattractive Southern sympathizer in the book. One of Willis's tales, 'The Night Funeral of a Slave', featured an abolitionist who visits the South and regrets his anti-slavery views; Frederick Douglass later used the work to criticize Northerners who were pro-slavery. Returning to New York City, Willis reorganized, along with George Pope Morris, the weekly New York Mirror as the daily Evening Mirror in 1844 with a weekly supplement called the Weekly Mirror, in part due to the rising cost of postage. 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 became 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, a number which would soon double. Even the popular poet Longfellow admitted his jealousy of Willis's salary. As a critic, Willis did not believe in including discussions of personalities of writers when reviewing their works. He also believed that, though publications should discuss political topics, they should not express party opinions or choose sides. 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. While Willis was editor of the Evening Mirror, it was the first to publish Poe's 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 during his wife Virginia's illness and while 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 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, whom 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. Willis's wife Mary Stace died in childbirth on March 25, 1845. Their daughter, Blanche, died as well and Willis wrote in his notebook that she was 'an angel without fault or foible'. He brought his surviving daughter Imogen to England to be with her mother's family and left her behind when he returned to the United States. In October 1846, he married Cornelia Grinnell, a wealthy Quaker from New Bedford and the adopted daughter of a local Congressman. She was two decades younger than Willis at the time and vocally disliked slavery, unlike her new husband. After the marriage, Willis's daughter Imogen came to live with the newlyweds in New York. In 1846, Willis and Morris left the Evening Mirror and attempted to edit a new weekly, the National Press, which was renamed the Home Journal after eight months. Their prospectus for the publication, published November 21, 1846, announced their intentions to create a magazine 'to circle around the family table'. Willis intended the magazine for the middle and lower classes and included the message of upward social mobility, using himself as an example, often describing in detail his personal possessions. When discussing his own social climbing, however, he emphasized his frustrations rather than his successes, endearing him to his audience. He edited the Home Journal until his death in 1867. It was renamed Town & Country in 1901, and it is still published under that title as of 2008. During Willis's time at the journal, he especially promoted the works of women poets, including Frances Sargent Osgood, Anne Lynch Botta, Grace Greenwood, and Julia Ward Howe. 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. 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'. He built a fourteen-room 'cottage', as he called it, at the edge of a plateau by Moodna Creek next to a sudden 200-foot (61 m) drop into a gorge. Willis worked closely with the architect, Calvert Vaux, to carefully plan each gable and piazza to fully take advantage of the dramatic view of the river and mountains. Because of failing health Willis spent the remainder of his life chiefly in retirement at Idlewild. His wife Cornelia was also recovering from a difficult illness after the birth of their first child together, a son named Grinnell, who was born April 28, 1848. They had four other children: Lilian (born April 27, 1850), 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. Harriet Jacobs was re-hired by Willis to work for the family. During these last years at Idlewild, Willis continued contributing a weekly letter to the Home Journal. In 1850 he assisted Rufus Wilmot Griswold in preparing an anthology of the works of Poe, who had died mysteriously the year before. Griswold also wrote the first biography of Poe in which he purposely set out to ruin the dead author's reputation. Willis was one of the most vocal of Poe's defenders, writing at one point: 'The indictment (for it deserves no other name) is not true. It is full of cruel misrepresentations. It deepens the shadows unto unnatural darkness, and shuts out the rays of sunshines that ought to relieve them'. Willis was involved in the 1850 divorce suit between the actor Edwin Forrest and his wife Catherine. In January 1849, Forrest had found a love letter to his wife from fellow actor George W. Jamieson. As a result, he and Catherine separated in April 1849. 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. His wife soon received an anonymous letter with an accusation that Willis was in an adulterous relationship with Catherine Forrest. Willis later sued Forrest for assault and, by March 1852, was awarded $2,500 plus court costs. Throughout the Forrest divorce case, which lasted six weeks, several witnesses made additional claims that Catherine Forrest and Nathaniel Parker Willis were having an affair, including a waiter who claimed he had seen the couple 'lying on each other'. As the press reported, 'thousands and thousands of the anxious public' awaited the court's verdict; ultimately, the court sided with Catherine Forrest and Willis's name was cleared. Willis arbitrarily refused to print the work of his sister Sara Willis ('Fanny Fern') after 1854, though she previously had contributed anonymous book reviews to the Home Journal. She had recently been widowed, became destitute, and was publicly denounced by her abusive second husband. Criticizing what he perceived as her restlessness, Willis, Baker and Scribner, New York, 1850, Belknap/Harvard. Used - Good. Former Library book. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside., Belknap/Harvard<
