Town talk sums up much of Willis, both what he was and what he wrote. He lived in the public eye; he wrote of the hour, for the hour. Naturally, therefore, his work was dying while he was yet alive. Now he is hardly more than a name. Of Andover and Yale what little impress he received was soon rubbed away by a life in which the daily cultivation of eminent society was industriously made to yield the daily crop of journalism. Indeed, a man so quick to take every new impression was hardly the man to bear the marks of many old ones. And of course the happy fluency that gave him even in youth a current popularity could dispense with that other and more deliberate merit of form. Form, since he had no native sense of it, and could get on swimmingly without it, he never seriously pursued. Few story-writers have spoiled so many good plots. Not only is he chatty, digressive, episodic, but he rarely has any clear solution and he never culminates. Such merit as The Inlet of Peach Blossoms has in this aspect is quite exceptional. Piquant, even vivid sometimes, in sketchy description, he has no composition. This, doubtless, is why of the hundred tales that pleased his public not one is read by ours.

Pencillings by the Way were supplied from Paris and London in the early ’30’s to the New York Mirror, and in collective form entertained both Britons and Americans. The characteristic title would serve as well for his subsequent collections. A list is appended to the biography in the American Men of Letters series by Professor Beers, who has also edited a volume of selections. A New York editor for many years, Willis touched at so many points the literary life of his time that this biography has been made admirably significant of its main social aspects. In fact, the life of Willis has more enduring interest than his works.