Burroughs, << BUR ohz, >> John (1837-1921), an American naturalist, became widely recognized as a writer on outdoor life. Burroughs’s writings made the beauties of the outdoors seem real to both children and adults. His description of birds, flowers, and a variety of natural settings in North America became increasingly poetic and philosophical over the course of his career.
Burroughs’s works include the essays “Bird Enemies,” “The Tragedies of the Nests,” “An Idyl of the Honey-Bee,” “Winter Neighbors,” and “A Taste of Maine Birch.” His books include Bird and Bough (1906), a collection of poems. Burroughs also wrote The Light of Day (1900), Camping and Tramping with Roosevelt (1907), Time and Change (1912), The Summit of the Years (1913), The Breath of Life (1915), and Under the Apple-Trees (1916).
Burroughs was born in Roxbury, New York. He spent his youth on his father’s farm, working, reading, and studying. He enjoyed the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Matthew Arnold, and John James Audubon. Burroughs’s view of nature put him in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau and Emerson.
Burroughs wrote his first book, Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person (1867), while a clerk in the United States Department of the Treasury in Washington, D.C. He left this post in 1873 and was a bank examiner for several years. He then moved to a farm in West Park on the Hudson River, where he had a log house called Slabsides. His friends and travel companions included Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas A. Edison, and Henry Ford.
