Nathaniel Parker Willis - Reputation

Reputation

Throughout his literary career, Willis was well liked and known for his good nature amongst friends. Well traveled and clever, he had a striking appearance at six feet tall and was typically dressed elegantly. Many, however, remarked that Willis was effeminate, Europeanized, and guilty of "Miss Nancyism". One editor called him "an impersonal passive verb—a pronoun of the feminine gender". A contemporary caricature depicted him wearing a fashionable beaver hat and tightly closed coat and carrying a cane, reflecting Willis's wide reputation as a "dandy". Willis put considerable effort into his appearance and his fashion sense, presenting himself as a member of an upcoming American aristocracy. As Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. once said, Willis was "something between a remembrance of Count D'Orsay and an anticipation of Oscar Wilde". Publisher Charles Frederick Briggs once wrote that "Willis was too Willisy". He described his writings as the "novelty and gossip of the hour" and was not necessarily concerned about facts but with the "material of conversation and speculation, which may be mere rumor, may be the truth". Willis's behavior in social groups annoyed fellow poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. "He is too artificial", Longfellow wrote to his friend George Washington Greene. "And his poetry has now lost one of its greatest charms for me—its sincerity". E. Burke Fisher, a journalist in Pittsburgh, wrote that "Willis is a kind of national pet and we must regard his faults as we do those of a spoiled stripling, in the hope that he will amend".

Willis built up his reputation in the public at a time when readers were interested in the personal lives of writers. In his writings, he described the "high life" of the "Upper Ten Thousand", a phrase he coined. His travel writings in particular were popular for this reason as Willis was actually living the life he was describing and recommending to readers. Even so, he manufactured a humble and modest persona, questioned his own literary merit, and purposely used titles, such as Pencillings by the Way and Dashes at Life With Free Pencil, which downplayed their own quality. His informally toned editorials, which covered a variety of topics, were also very successful. Using whimsicality and humor, he was purposely informal to allow his personality to show in his writing. He addressed his readers personally, as if having a private conversation with them. As he once wrote: "We would have you ... indulge us in our innocent egotism as if it were all whispered in your private ear and over our iced Margaux". When women poets were becoming popular in the 1850s, he emulated their style and focused on sentimental and moral subjects.

In the publishing world, Willis was known as a shrewd magazinist and an innovator who focused on appealing to readers' special interests while still recognizing new talent. In fact, Willis became the standard by which other magazinists were judged. According to writer George William Curtis, "His gayety and his graceful fluency made him the first of our proper 'magazinists'". For a time, it was said that Willis was the "most-talked-about author" in the United States. Poe questioned Willis's fame, however. "Willis is no genius–a graceful trifler–no more", he wrote in a letter to James Russell Lowell. "In me, at least, he never excites an emotion." Minor Southern writer Joseph Beckham Cobb wrote: "No sane person, we are persuaded, can read his poetry". Future senator Charles Sumner reported: "I find Willis is much laughed at for his sketches". Even so, most contemporaries recognized how prolific he was as a writer and how much time he put into all of his writings. James Parton said of him:

Of all the literary men whom I have ever known, N. P. Willis was the one who took the most pains with his work. It was no very uncommon thing for him to toil over a sentence for an hour; and I knew him one evening to write and rewrite a sentence for two hours before he had got it to his mind.

By 1850 and with the publication of Hurry-Graphs, Willis was becoming a forgotten celebrity. In August 1853, future President James A. Garfield discussed Willis's declining popularity in his diary: "Willis is said to be a licentious man, although an unrivaled poet. How strange that such men should go to ruin, when they might soar perpetually in the heaven of heavens". After Willis's death, obituaries reported that he had outlived his fame. One remarked, "the man who withdraws from the whirling currents of active life is speedily forgotten". This obituary also stated that Americans "will ever remember and cherish Nathaniel P. Willis as one worthy to stand with Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving". In 1946, the centennial issue of Town & Country reported that Willis "led a generation of Americans through a gate where weeds gave way to horticulture". More modern scholars have dismissed Willis's work as "sentimental prattle" or refer to him only as an obstacle in the progress of his more talented sister as well as Harriet Jacobs. As biographer Thomas N. Baker wrote, Willis is today only referred to as a footnote in relation to other authors.