biography
pronunciation:
[buhrohz]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1837–1921)
|
| biography:
| Naturalist and writer, born near Roxbury, New York, USA. Raised on a farm in the lower Catskills, and intermittently educated, he taught at schools in Illinois and New Jersey, and published his first nature essay in 1860. He took a job as a treasury department clerk in Washington (1863) and met Walt Whitman there, who provided the title for his first book, Wake-Robin (1871). On assignment in England for the Treasury Department (1871), he gathered material later used in essays published as Winter Sunshine (1875). On reviewing this book, Henry James called him ‘a sort of reduced... Thoreau’. Burroughs returned to the Catskills (1873), built a house on the W bank of the Hudson near Esopus, NY, and wrote on average one book every two years for the rest of his life. Long-bearded and rustic, he became something of a sage, his woodland cabin ‘Slabsides’ becoming the goal of naturalist pilgrims. He travelled 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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