Fanny Fern (born Sara Payson Willis; July 9, 1811 – October 10, 1872), was an American novelist, children's writer, humorist, and newspaper columnist in the 1850s to 1870s.

[2] Her younger brother Richard Storrs Willis became a musician and music journalist, known for writing the melody for "It Came Upon the Midnight Clear".

[3] Her other siblings were Lucy Douglas (born 1804), Louisa Harris (1807), Julia Dean (1809), Mary Perry (1813), Edward Payson (1816), and Ellen Holmes Willis (1821).

[4] Inspired by Reverend Edward Payson of Portland's Second Congregational Church, her father intended to name his fifth child after the minister.

Willis's surname was to change often in her life, throughout three marriages and the adoption of her chosen pen name "Fanny Fern."

After returning home, Willis wrote and edited articles for her father's Christian newspapers, The Puritan Recorder[7] and The Youth's Companion.

[9] Willis published her first article, "The Governess", in November 1851 in the new Boston newspaper Olive Branch, followed by some short satirical pieces there and in True Flag.

She sent samples of her work her own name to her brother Nathaniel, by then a magazine owner, but he refused them and said her writing was not marketable outside Boston.

He was proved wrong, as newspapers and periodicals in New York and elsewhere began printing Fanny Fern's "witty and irreverent columns".

"[15] James Parton, a biographer and historian who edited Home Journal, the magazine owned by Fern's brother Nathaniel (known as N.P.

Three years into her career, in 1855 she was earning $100 a week for her column in the New York Ledger, making her the highest-paid columnist in the United States.

[16] Her first regular column appeared on January 5, 1856, and would run weekly, without exception, until October 12, 1872, when the last edition was printed two days after her death.

Her first, Ruth Hall (1854), was based on her life – the years of happiness with Eldredge, the poverty she endured after he died and lack of help from male relatives, and her struggle to achieve financial independence as a journalist.

When Fern's identity was revealed shortly after the novel's publication, some critics believed it scandalous that she had attacked her own relatives; they decried her lack of filial piety and her want of "womanly gentleness" in such characterizations.

The author Nathaniel Hawthorne, who had earlier complained about the "damned mob of scribbling women", wrote to his publisher in early 1855 in praise of the novel.

"[19] Wounded by the criticism and ambivalent about the wide publicity she stirred up, Fern tried to reduce the autobiographical elements in her second novel, Rose Clark.

But while it features a conventionally sweet and gentle heroine, a secondary character makes a poor marriage of convenience, an act which Fern had regretted in her own life.

In her Ledger column of May 10, 1856, she defended the poet Walt Whitman in a favorable review of his controversial book Leaves of Grass.

[2] Column collections Novels Children's books Fern developed a writing style that closely reflected her pugnacious personality, with its common-sensical optimistic approach, always leavened with a dash of humor.

Instead of calling for the radical reconstruction of society, she told her large audience of middle-class women to improve their health and their minds, urging downtrodden wives to be patient and bore from within.

[citation needed] Nathaniel Hawthorne praised her as an exception to the "damned mob of scribbling women", who wrote "as if the devil was in her".