John Burroughs (1837-1921) was a popular writer of his time and called “father of the nature essay”, yet surprisingly he is not widely read today. Spending most of his life in the Catskill Mountains and the Hudson River valley, his life was deeply rooted in the land he loved. This love of the natural world, especially the familiar landscape of the rural farmlands of New York State, developed his exceptional skill of observation and his passion for scientific subjects, such as geology and ornithology. Natural history became an integral part of his work as a writer, and hence he called himself a “literary naturalist”. His work weaves together topics of such scientific observations, as well as thoughts on literature, philosophy, religion, and the relationship between Man and his world.

Raised on his family’s Roxbury dairy farm, Burroughs was an eager schoolboy and at the age of seventeen, commenced a ten-year career as a school teacher, a period during which he began writing essays for magazines and met his wife, Ursula North. The couple set up housekeeping in Washington, D.C., where Burroughs worked at the Treasury Department, and where he befriended the most influential Walt Whitman. As his writing career began to advance, he moved to West Park, N.Y. to a vineyard, thereafter named “Riverby”. Much of his time and energy came to be spent on the commercial cultivation of table grapes, continuing his successful writing career, and entertaining visitors, including Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir. Burroughs continued writing until his death in 1921, leaving behind a substantial body of work, amounting to more than four hundred essays published in anthologies, and several other books.

List of Books by John Burroughs:

Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person (1865)

Wake Robin (1871)

Winter Sunshine (1875)

Birds and Poets (1877)

Locusts and Wild Honey (1879)

Pepacton (1881)

Fresh Fields (1884)

Signs and Seasons (1886)

Indoor Studies (1889)

Riverby (1894)

Whitman: A Study (1896)

Songs of Nature (editor) (1896)

Light of Day (1900)

John James Audubon (1902)

Literary Values (1902)

Far and Near (1904)

Ways of Nature (1905)

Bird and Bough (1906)

Camping with President Roosevelt (1907) (Camping and Tramping with President Roosevelt) (1907)

Leaf and Tendril (1908)

The Natural History of Selbourne, by Gilbert White (editor) (1908)

Time and Change (1912)

The Summit of the Years (1913)

The Breath of Life (1913)

Under the Apple Trees (1916)

Field and Study (1919)

Accepting the Universe (1920)

Under the Maples (1921)

The Last Harvest (1922)