Nathaniel Parker Willis

Nathaniel Parker Willis (1807-67), for many years the most talked of among American authors, was a native of Portland, Maine, the birthplace of Seba Smith, John Neal, and Henry W. Longfellow. His father and grandfather were publishers, the grandfather having been an apprentice in the office with Benjamin Franklin, and a member of the famous "Boston tea-party." He was graduated from Yale College, and began his literary career by winning a prize of fifty dollars offered by the publishers of an illustrated annual.

 Willis spent several years in Europe, where he wrote "Penciling by the way" for his "New York Mirror," and before his return to New York in 1837, he married an English lady, and fought a duel with Captain Marryat. Having lost his wife, Willis, in 1843, married the only daughter of Joseph Grinnell, and soon after established, with Morris, the weekly, "The Home Journal." To its columns he contributed, for nearly a quarter of a century, much of the material afterwards embodied in some two score of duodecimo volumes. He published, in 1856, "Paul Fane," a novel, and he was also the author of several plays and various volumes of poems, issued between the years 1827 and 1860. Many of his sacred poems have found a place in the popular collections, some in hymn-books. Willis lived for the last twenty years of his active literary life, except for occasional health trips to the tropics, and to the southern and western States, at his place called Idlewild, a picturesque mansion admirably situated on a plateau north of the Highlands, and within sound of the guns at West Point. There it was that after battling bravely for existence for many years, he at length fell a victim to consumption, on the sixtieth anniversary of his birth, and was laid at rest by the side of his mother's grave in Mount Auburn.

Poe in New York

Though a good deal of the literary life of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was spent in Philadelphia and in other centers remote from New York, his later years were in large part spent in New York, where his wife died, and where he wrote some of his best-known compositions. He was born in Boston, the son of David Poe and his wife Elizabeth, members of the theatrical profession, who both died in the South soon after Edgar was born. While a child Edgar was adopted by John Allan, a wealthy citizen of Richmond, who sent him to England to be educated. Poe afterwards wintered the University of Virginia, where he excelled in his studies, but from which he was expelled for gambling. He was a year afterwards admitted into the United States Military Academy at West Point, from which he was also expelled at the expiration of ten months.

Poe entered upon his literary career by winning two prizes of $100 each, offered by a Baltimore publisher in 1833. Five years before he had published in Boston "Tamerlane and Other Poems," a copy of which was sold in 1892 for $1,850 and later for $2,500. Through the influence of John P. Kennedy he obtained the editorship of the "Southern Literary Messenger." While in this position he married his cousin, Miss Virginia Clemm, with whom he moved to New York. Here he made a precarious living by writing for the magazines, and in 1838 published "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym," and created the modern school of short story writing. The following year he became editor of "Burton's Gentleman"s Magazine"; in 1840, of "Graham's Magazine," published in Philadelphia; and in 1845, having returned to New York, he published his poem, "The Raven," which made him famous. He next became editor of the "Broadway Journal," but was so poor that public appeals were made in his behalf by the newspapers. A letter addressed at this time to Fitz-Greene Halleck by Poe shows his position very clearly:

New York, December 1, 1845

My dear Mr. Halleck: On the part of one or two persons who are much embittered against me, there is a deliberate attempt now being made to involve me in ruin by destroying the "Broadway Journal." I could easily frustrate them but for my total want of money and of the necessary time in which to procure it; the knowledge of this has given my enemies the opportunities desired. In this emergency, without the leisure to think whether I am acting improperly, I venture to appeal to you. The sum I need is one hundred dollars. If you can loan me for three months any portion of it, I will not be ungrateful.

Truly Yours, Edgar A. Poe.

In 1849 Poe's wife died, after which he went to Richmond and there formed an engagement with a lady of fortune; but before the day appointed for their marriage Poe became ill, was taken to a hospital, and died there. His grave remained unmarked till 1875, when the school teachers of Baltimore placed a monument over it. On May 4, 1885, the Poe Memorial was unveiled in the Poet's Corner of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. It was dedicated with appropriate ceremonies, in the presence of a notable gathering of authors, actors and artists. It is a curious fact that Fitz-Greene Halleck, chiefly through the efforts of his biographer, and Edgar A. Poe, by the liberality of the members of the theatrical profession, to which his parents belonged, secured their memorial statues and bas-reliefs in Central Park before Bryant, Cooper and Irving.

Poe's works in prose and verse were collected after his death and published with a memoir by Dr. Griswold. Afterwards his life was written by Mrs. Whitman, to whom he is said to have been engaged, and by Richard Henry Stoddard, William F. Gill, John H. Ingram, and George E. Woodberry, all of whom viewed his character more favorably than did Griswold.

Figures of Our Augustan Literary Age

These were some of the representative figures in a notable age of American literature. A high English authority mentions Bryant as one of the most eminent of English-speaking poets, who has written one of the noblest poems in the language. Dana, Halleck, and Longfellow looked up to Bryant as to a master. Whitman placed Bryant at the head of American poets. Dickens admired Halleck above all other American poets, with the exception of Irving. Samuel Rogers declared that two or three of Halleck's productions surpassed anything that he had seen from the New World, and Alfred B. Street asserted that he would rather have been the author of Halleck's six best poems than of any other half dozen written by an American. Poe, the next of the Knickerbocker trio of poets, is placed by competent authorities among the greatest. To quote one critic: "In the regions of the strangely terrible, remotely fantastic, and ghastly, Poe reigns supreme."

It might be doubted whether the prediction will be verified that few American writers of the first fifty years of the nineteenth century were destined to last another fifty years, wrote General James Grant Wilson, towards the close of the century. We do not believe that the productions of Bryant and Cooper, of Halleck and Irving, of Drake and Edgar A. Poe, and the other principal Knickerbockers, will be forgotten in the year 1943. On the contrary, we have the faith to believe that at least a portion of their writings, together with those of Bancroft and Emerson, of Hawthorne and Holmes, of Longfellow and Lowell, of Prescott and Whittier, will successfully endure the test of a much longer period; that "upon the adamant of their fame, the stream of Time beats without injury."

A few of the many minor authors who, in prose and verse, contributed to the "Knickerbocker Literature," during the first half of the present century, are still among us with their "locks of grey"; but the great majority, crowned with years and honors, have passed away to join the "dead but scepterd sovereigns who still rule over our spirits from their urns." These writers were the brilliant pioneers of American literature; for the only professional authors of the New World who preceded them were Joseph Dennie and Charles Brockden Brown. Many voices have followed Bryant and Cooper, Halleck and Irving, Paulding and Verplanck; but we shall not forget the forerunners who rose in advance of their welcome in what Bacon beautifully calls "the great ship of Time."

Notwithstanding the prevailing fashion among many recent writers to underrate and sneer at the "Knickerbocker Literature," it would seem, in the writer's judgment that Irving, Bryant, Poe, Cooper, and their comrades certainly contributed at least no less to the literary glory of their native land than have Prescott, Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, and their New England contemporaries. When a very great man was asked by the author for his opinion on this point he answered: " They cannot be compared, any more than you would compare the commerce of the city of Boston with that of your great metropolis."

The Civil War, of course, involved a cessation of literary activity, but upon its close there were many who dropped the sword to resume the pen, among the most useful of the New Yorkers being James Grant Wilson, from whose history an excerpt has just been quoted. It was not until 1865 that William Dean Howells returned from his consulate at Venice to join the staff of " The Nation," where he remained until tempted to Boston by an offer from the "Atlantic Monthly" a year later. The Bohemianism of New York's literary set did not appeal to Mr. Howells, who none the less described it fairly, contrasting it with his associations in New England, where Longfellow was still in his prime, though Emerson had entered upon his twilight. The New Yorkers were, in fact, given too much beer and talk at places like Pfaff's, while the New Englanders gave tea parties, although there was always good wine at Mr. Longfellow's dinners. There was no acknowledged rivalry for literary supremacy between New York and Boston, rather a frank attitude on the part of the transcendentalists of superiority at which the New Yorkers professed amusement.

But Mr. Howells in shaking the dust of New York from off his feet did not burn his bridges. A decade later he was contributing to "Harper's Magazine," preparing the way for his brief editorship of the "Cosmopolitan" and his long occupancy of the "Editor's Easy Chair" in " Harper's." With his return to New York, New England's rivalry was at an end. The greater part of Mr. Howell's vast array of books were written in New York, and before he had become known as "the Dean of American Letters," he was the Nestor of New York's literati.