Him a real originality, and his sketches have a delightful oddity, vivacity, and freshness." Burroughs was born in 1837, the same year that Henry Thoreau graduated from Harvard. Along with Thoreau and John Muir, he was one of the nineteenth century's most popular and preeminent nature writers. In the course of his long life, Burroughs authored more than twenty-eight books on natural history and literature. Writing during the increasingly industrial decades of the late.

This study situates John Burroughs, together with John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt, as one of a trinity of thinkers who, between the Civil War and World War I, defined and secured a place for nature in mainstream American culture. Though not as well known today, Burroughs was the most popular American nature writer of his time. Prolific and consistent, he published scores of essays in influential large-circulation magazines and was often compared to Thoreau. Unlike Thoreau, however, whose reputation grew posthumously, Burroughs wasa celebrity during his lifetime: he wrote more than thirty books, enjoyed a continual high level of visibility, and saw his work taught widely in public schools. James Perrin Warren shows how Burroughs helped guide urban and suburban middle-class readers “back to nature” during a time of intense industrialization and urbanization. Warren discusses Burroughs’s connections not only to Muir and Roosevelt but also to his forebears Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. By tracing the complex philosophical, creative, and temperamental lineage of these six giants, Warren shows how, in their friendships and rivalries, Burroughs, Muir, and Roosevelt made the high literary romanticism of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman relevant to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Americans. At the same time, Warren offers insights into the rise of the nature essay as a genre, the role of popular magazines as shapers and conveyors of public values, and the dynamism of place in terms of such opposed concepts as retreat and engagement, nature and culture, and wilderness and civilization. Because Warren draws on Burroughs’s personal, critical, and philosophical writings as well as his better-known narrative essays, readers will come away with a more informed sense of Burroughs as a literary naturalist and a major early practitioner of ecocriticism. John Burroughs and the Place of Nature helps extend the map of America’s cultural landscape during the period 1870-1920 by recovering an unfairly neglected practitioner of one of his era’s most effective forces for change: nature writing.

A collection of essays by noted naturalist John Burroughs in which he contemplates a wide array of topics including farming, religion, and conservation. A departure from previous John Burroughs anthologies, this volume celebrates the surprising range of his writing to include religion, philosophy, conservation, and farming. In doing so, it emphasizes the process of the literary naturalist, specifically the lively connection the author makes between perceiving nature and how perception permeates all aspects of life experiences

"Wake-Robin", John Burroughs' first book, is a detailed work on birds, being an alluring "invitation to the study of Ornithology". It's aim is to stimulate an interest in the natural history of birds, which Burroughs arguably achieves through a masterful marriage of interesting facts and beautiful writing. John Burroughs (1837 - 1921) was an American naturalist, essayist, and active member of the U.S. conservation movement. Burroughs' work was incredibly popular during his lifetime, and his legacy has lived on in the form of twelve U.S. Schools named after him, Burroughs Mountain, and the John Burroughs Association-which publicly recognizes well-written and illustrated natural history publications. Other notable works by this author include: "Winter Sunshine" (1875), "Birds and Poets" (1877), and "Locusts and Wild Honey" (1879). Contents include: "The Return of the Birds", "In the Hemlocks", "The Adirondacks", "Birds'-Nests", "Spring at the Capital", "Birch Browsings", "The Bluebird", "The Invitation", etc. . Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. We are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author.

Born in 1837 in the Catskill Mountains of New York State and a longtime resident of the Hudson River Valley, Burroughs spent his life studying the natural world. His powerful verbal landscapes and philosophical insights into the natural world during the height of the Industrial Revolution were read by hundreds of thousands of people -- from powerful industrialists to countless schoolchildren. He counted among his friends the poet Wait Whitman, the pioneering preservationist President Teddy Roosevelt, Thomas Edison, and Andrew Carnegie. Henry Ford, whose own farmland upbringing Burroughs's writing recalled, not only gave the writer a Model T car and went camping with him, but also purchased his boyhood homestead, which Burroughs and other relatives were having trouble maintaining, and deeded it to his friend. Author Ed Kanze, himself a naturalist, writer and photographer, sheds new light on Burroughs's enormous contribution to how we think about our environment. His biographical text is enhanced by many quotations from Burroughs's essays and poems and, uniquely, by conversations with Burroughs's granddaughter, who contributed numerous affectionate recollections of her grandfather as well as many archival photographs of him, his farm and woodland writing studio, "Slabsides, " and family and friends -- including Muir, Roosevelt, Ford, Edison, and others. The text is further enlivened with crisp color photographs by Ed Kanze that evoke the landscapes Burroughs knew and loved and the many birds, animals, and plants that he wrote about with such intimacy and feeling. Burroughs's world truly comes alive again in the words and pictures of this book.

John Burroughs, the genial and tremendously popular author of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, has gained renewed appreciation at the end of the twentieth century. His quiet approach to nature writing—a combination of scientific observation and poetic spirit, has informed generations of readers. This book is a testament to the importance of his work in modern literature. In addition to exploring the historical aspects of Burroughs's life and character, these works illuminate his role as a writer and his relationships with such contemporaries as Whitman, Thoreau, Emerson, and Muir. Frank Bergan discusses Burroughs as environmentalist, Bill McKibben writes on Burroughs and the call of the "not so wild," Daniel Payne expounds on Burroughs's religion of nature, Wendell Berry considers the sacred economy of homesteading, and Ralph Black provides an analysis on Burroughs and the poetics of the nature essay. This book will have special appeal to those interested in nature writing, American literature, and environmental and cultural history of New York State. A section on the history and current use of Burroughs's work in the classroom also makes the book a valuable resource for teachers.

This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.