WILLIS, Nathaniel Parker, American author: b. Portland, Me., 20 Jan. 1806; et Idle wild, N. Y., 20 Jan. 1867. He was graduated fro= Yale in 1837 and was employed by S. G. Goodrich (•Peter Parley') to edit two annuals, the Legendary in 18M and the Token in 1829. In 1828 he established at Boston the Assserican Monthly Maga:Me, which, after he had conducted it for two and a half years, was merged in the New York Mirror. He then set out on a tour of travel through Europe, visit ing France, Italy, Greece, European Turkey. Asia Minor, and finally England, with the rank of an attaché to the American embassy at Paris, but chiefly as • correspondent of the Mirror, for which he wrote his 'Pencillings by the Way,' later (1835) published in book-form. He returned in 18.36, became in 1839 editor of the Corsair, a New York periodical (1839-40), and in the same year again went to England. He returned to New York in 1846 and subse quently directed- two short-lived papers, The New Mirror and The Evening Mir ror Once more in Europe in 1845 46 he became in the last-named year editor of Tit, Home Journal, the most successful of all his journalistic ventures, in the mans anent of which he was associated with George P. Morris (q.v.). Willis was from the first a facile versi fier and a prose-writer of great reportorial cleverness. His scriptural poems were in their
day very popular, and many are still readable; and his other verse, when nothing else, was metrically able. Sometimes it reached real poetic value and effective specimens of it have preserved by the anthologist. His fiction, except the 'Slingsby' papers, written for the English New Monthly, is popular hut not strong. 'Pencillings by the Way' (1835) abounds in talented sketches of contemporaries. Willis was the most successful American journalist of his time and his vogue w as great. Among his princiri works are 'Pencillings by the Way' (1835 ; 'Inklings of Adventure' (1836); two dramas entitled 'Two Ways of Dying for a Husband' (1830); 'Loiterings of Travel' 41840): 'flashes at Life with a Free Pencil' (1845) ; (People I Have Met, or Pictures of Society and People of Mark, Drawn Under a Thin Veil of Fiction' (1850); (Hurrygraphs' (1851); a 'Health Trip to the Tropics' (18a3); 'Outdoors at Idlcwild' (1854); 'The Rag-hag,' a collection of ephemera (1855); 'The Con valescent, His Rambles and Adventures.' Con sult the 'Life' by Beers ('American Men of Letters,' 1885). 'There is an estimate of Willis in Lowell's 'Fable for Critics.'