John Burroughs

John Burroughs 1837-1921, American naturalist and author, b. Roxbury, N.Y.; son of a farmer. He was a journalist, a treasury clerk in Washington, and a bank examiner, before settling in 1874 on a farm near Esopus, N.Y. There he studied fruit culture and literature. His first book, Walt Whitman, Poet and Person (1867), was the first to adequately recognize the genius of his poet friend. His prose made widely popular the type of nature essay written by Thoreau. His best-known books are Wake Robin (1871); Locusts and Wild Honey (1879); Fresh Fields, a travel book (1884); Signs and Seasons (1886); and a volume of poems, Bird and Bough (1906). A growing interest in philosophy and in science is evident in Time and Change (1912), The Summit of the Years (1913), The Breath of Life (1915), and Accepting the Universe (1922). "The Sage of Slabsides" became the friend of John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, Edison, Ford, and other important people. He traveled to the Pacific coast, the South, the West Indies, Europe, and (with the Harriman expedition) Alaska, recording natural phenomena in simple, expressive prose.

Bibliography: See his autobiography, My Boyhood (1922); biographies by E. B. Kelley (1959) and P. G. Westbrook (1974).

Burroughs, John (1837–1921), through keen observation of his native Catskills and under the influence of Emerson and Thoreau, became the greatest writer of nature essays after his two Transcendentalist masters. Although all his writing is characterized by a distinctive charm and simplicity, his first works, such as Wake‐Robin (1871) and Birds and Poets (1877), are the most poetic in manner. Locusts and Wild Honey (1879) and Squirrels and Other Fur‐Bearers (1900) are products of a period of more scientific observation, which lasted until c.1908. During his final years Burroughs held the belief that the salvation of society depends upon “the great teachers and prophets, poets and mystics,” rather than upon cold scientific reason, and he expressed this creed in such books as The Breath of Life (1915) and Accepting the Universe (1920). He was a friend of Whitman, and his early appreciation of the poet may be seen in Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person (1867), a book written in part by the subject. My Boyhood (1922) is autobiographical; The Heart of John Burroughs's Journals appeared in 1928. A good selection of his writings is A River View, Hudson Valley essays edited by Edward Renehan, Jr., who also wrote a fine critical biography, John Burroughs, an American Naturalist (1992).