Burroughs, John

(1837–1921) naturalist, author; born near Roxbury, N.Y. Raised on a farm in the lower Catskills, intermittently educated, he taught school in Illinois and New Jersey and published his first nature essay in 1860. He took a job as a treasury department clerk in Washington in 1863 and met Walt Whitman there; Whitman provided the title for his first book, Wake-Robin (1871). On assignment in England for the Treasury Department in 1871, he gathered material later used in essays published as Winter Sunshine (1875); reviewing the book, Henry James called him "a sort of reduced… Thoreau." He returned to the Catskills in 1873, built a house on the west bank of the Hudson near Esopus, N.Y., and turned out a book on the average of one every two years for the rest of his life. Long-bearded and rustic, he became something of a sage, his woodland cabin "Slabsides" the goal of naturalist pilgrims. He traveled widely in later years and formed friendships with Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas A. Edison and Henry Ford. He is credited, more than any other American writer, with establishing the nature essay as an important literary form.

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