Willis Steell

Willis Steell (1866–1941) was an American journalist, poet, dramatist, novelist and translator.

Steell seems to have begun his literary career in New York as a journalist on the New York Tribune from 1887 to 1888, and soon became the New York correspondent for the Albany Press, St. Paul Dispatch, Chicago Times, and Nashville American, and soon was head of a syndicate of Southern papers.

In the 1920s he was the Paris correspondent of the New York Herald at which time he interviewed Gertrude Stein in 1924 after she published her long gestated novel The Making of Americans. The reason he moved to Paris was to be near his daughter Susan Steell (born 1906), who had won the first scholarship for American girls to study singing in Paris with the French mezzo-soprano Blanche Marchesi that had been established in 1923 by the opera singer Marie Jeritza. Her father commissioned a portrait of her about 1923 from the Swiss-born American artist Adolfo Müller-Ury, which was exhibited in 1925 and of which American Art News, April 11, 1925, said that it ‘...shows Mr. Ury at his most discerning.’ Susan (often later called Suzanne) was to enter Broadway, and became one of the close friends of Katharine Hepburn at the time of her first Hollywood success. Susan died in 1959 at 53.

His first novel was the well-received Isidra: The Patriot Daughter of Mexico – a Mexican story of the French intervention (1888) which was compared with some of the work of Bret Harte (1836–1902).

By 1898, he had written, amongst a mass of journalism by this time, a number of fictional and dramatic works: The Morning after the Play: A Comedy in One Act (1889), Mortal Lips (1890) a story of contemporary life in Harlem,In Seville, & Three Toledo Days – a series of Spanish sketches (1894), and The Fifth Commandment A Play in One Act (1898). He had also written poetry, and a long poem about Christopher Columbus called The Death of The Discoverer appeared in book form in Philadelphia in 1892.

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