This groundbreaking new source of international scope defines the essay as nonfictional prose texts of between one and 50 pages in length. The more than 500 entries by 275 contributors include entries on nationalities, various categories of essays such as generic (such as sermons, aphorisms), individual major works, notable writers, and periodicals that created a market for essays, and particularly famous or significant essays. The preface details the historical development of the essay, and the alphabetically arranged entries usually include biographical sketch, nationality, era, selected writings list, additional readings, and anthologies

A rich selection of passages from the authors 25 books includes delightful pieces, written with grace and elegance, about the rewards (and frustrations) of trout fishing; the lives and habits of foxes, chipmunks, hawks, weasels, honeybees, and other creatures; the rhythms of the seasons, and many other topics. Enhanced with 28 charming woodcut illustrations.

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.

There is no moment like the present; not only so, but, moreover, there is no moment at all, that is, no instant force and energy, but in the present. The man who will not execute his resolutions when they are fresh upon him can have no hope from them afterwards: they will be dissipated, lost, and perish in the hurry and skurry of the world, or sunk in the slough of indolence. -Maria Edgeworth. Maria Edgeworth, a noted English novelist, was born in Black Bourton, Oxfordshire, January 1, 1767, and died in Edgeworthstown, Ireland, May, 1849. She wrote: "Early Lessons," "Castle Rackrent," "Tales of Fashionable Life," "Belinda," "Leonora," "Moral Tales," "The Modern Griselda," "Helen," "Ormond," and "Patronage." 'Tis always morning somewhere in the world. "Orion," Book iii, Canto ii (1843).-Richard Henry Horne. Richard Henry Horne, a famous English miscellaneous writer, was born January 1, 1803, and died March 13, 1884. His principal works are: "The Dreamer and the Worker," "Cosmo de' Medici," "Orion," "A New Spirit of the Age," "The Death of Marlowe," "Judas Iscariot, A Miracle Play," "Australian Facts and Prospects," and "Exposition of the False Medium, and Barriers Excluding Men of Genius from the Public."