John Burroughs

John Burroughs was an American naturalist and essayist important in the evolution of the U.S. conservation movement. According to biographers at the American Memory project at the Library of Congress, John Burroughs was the most important practitioner after Thoreau of that especially American literary genre, the nature essay. By the turn of the century he had become a virtual cultural institution in his own right: the Grand Old Man of Nature at a time when the American romance with the idea of nature, and the American conservation movement, had come fully into their own.

His extraordinary popularity and popular visibility were sustained by a prolific stream of essay collections, beginning with Wake-Robin in 1871.

In the words of his biographer Edward Renehan, Burroughs's special identity was less that of a scientific naturalist than that of "a literary naturalist with a duty to record his own unique perceptions of the natural world."

The result was a body of work whose perfect resonance with the tone of its cultural moment perhaps explains both its enormous popularity at that time, and its relative obscurity since.

Burroughs was the seventh child of Chauncy and Amy Kelly Burroughs' ten children. He was born on the family farm in the Catskill Mountains, near Roxbury, New York, Delaware County, New York. As a child he would spend many hours on the slopes of Old Clump Mountain, looking off to the east and the higher peaks of the Catskills, especially Slide Mountain, which he would later write about. His classmates at a local school included Jay Gould.

He left school at the age of 17 to become a teacher, while he continued his studies at a number of institutions including Cooperstown Seminary. There he first read the works of William Wordsworth and Ralph Waldo Emerson, both of whom would become lifelong influences through their focus on nature and its effect on the spirit. He left seminary in July of 1856 and made his way to the small village of Buffalo Grove in Illinois. There he taught until the following year, but would return East to marry "the girl I left behind me".

On September 12, 1857, he married Ursula North (1836-1917). He continued his teaching career with an eye toward becoming a published author. The couple struggled financially and were not able to set up their own household until 1859. 

The next year he finally got a small break as a writer, when the Atlantic Monthly, then a fairly new publication, accepted his essay Expression. (Editor James Russell Lowell found it so similar to Emerson's work that he initially thought Burroughs had plagiarized his longtime acquaintance.) A short poem, Waiting, also attracted some attention.

In 1864, Burroughs accepted a position as a clerk at the Treasury; he would eventually become a federal bank examiner, continuing in that profession into the 1880s. All the while, he continued to publish, and grew interested in the poetry of Walt Whitman. Burroughs met Whitman during the Civil War in Washington, and the two became close friends.

Whitman encouraged Burroughs to develop his nature writing as well as his philosophical and literary essays. In 1867, Burroughs published Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person, the first biography and critical work on the poet, which was extensively (and anonymously) revised and edited by Whitman himself before publication.

Four years later, the Boston house of Hurd & Houghton published Burroughs's first collection of nature essays, Wake-Robin. 

In 1874, Burroughs bought a big farm in West Park, NY (now part of the Town of Esopus). Here he grew a host of crops before eventually focusing on fancy table grapes, and devoted himself to his writing while also continuing to labor, for several more years, as a federal bank examiner. This may be the property named Riverby.

Later, he bought some land nearby and in the fall of 1894, began work with his son Julian Burroughs (1878-December 15, 1954) on an Adirondack-style cabin that would be called "Slabsides”. At Slabsides he wrote, grew a large field of celery, and entertained visitors, including students from local Vassar College.

After the turn of the century, Burroughs renovated an old farmhouse near his birthplace and called it "Woodchuck Lodge." This became his summer residence until his death.

He wrote more than 30 books, and published hundreds of essays and poems in magazines. His achievements as a writer were confirmed by his election as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.