| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Sentiment & Celebrity: Nathaniel Parker Willis and the Trials of Literary Fame. By Thomas N. Baker. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. xii, 252 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-19-512073-6.)

Nathaniel Parker Willis (1806–1867) is best known today as the brother of Fanny Fern (Sarah Payson Willis), the literary dandy whom she satirized as Hyacinth Ellet in her semi-autobiographical novel Ruth Hall (1854). In fact, Willis was among America's most prolific magazine writers and foremost editors, a literary celebrity who helped define the meaning of gentility for a new middle class through his Home Journal and other publications. Thomas N. Baker sees Willis as something more: an exemplary and central figure in creating our modern culture of personality. A pair of paradoxes underlay Willis's career: his "sentimental persuasion" glorified domestic privacy even as his journalism commercialized intimacy, and the celebrity culture he promoted often made Willis himself the object of scandal and ridicule as well as sentimental adulation. . . .

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