Burroughs, John
Burroughs, John,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 areWake 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 inTime and Change(1912),The Summit of the Years(1913),The Breath of Life(1915), andAccepting the Universe(1922).
The Sage of Slabsidesbecame 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.
See his autobiography,My Boyhood(1922); biographies by E. B. Kelley (1959) and P. G. Westbrook (1974).
The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia,6th ed. Copyright © 2012, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.
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