John Burroughs was an American essayist and naturalist who lived and wrote after the manner of Henry David Thoreau, studying and celebrating nature. In the words of his biographer Edward Renehan, Burroughs' 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 first of his essay collections was "Wake-Robin" in 1871.
Background
John Burroughs was born on the family dairy farm in the Catskill Mountains near Roxbury, New York, United States on April 3, 1837. He was the seventh of 10 children of Chauncy and Amy Kelly Burroughs. As a child he spent 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. As he labored on the family farm he was captivated by the return of the birds each spring and other wildlife around the family farm including frogs and bumblebees. In his later years he credited his life as a farm boy for his subsequent love of nature and feeling of kinship with all rural things.
Education
During his teen years Burroughs showed a keen interest in learning. Among Burroughs's classmates was future financier Jay Gould. Burroughs' father believed the basic education provided by the local school was enough and refused to support the young Burroughs when he asked for money to pay for the books or the higher education he wanted. At the age of 17 Burroughs left home to earn the money he needed for college by teaching at a school in Olive, New York. From 1854 to 1856 Burroughs alternated periods of teaching with periods of study at higher education institutions including Cooperstown Seminary; he left the Seminary and completed his studies in 1856. Between 1854 and 1860 he also attended Hedding Literary Institute at Ashland, New York.
Career
Burroughs taught s at such institutions as Cooperstown Seminary, where he developed enthusiasm for the work of William Wordsworth and Ralph Waldo Emerson. He was only 23 when James Russell Lowell accepted his essay "Expression" for the Atlantic Monthly. The essay sounded so much like Emerson's work that Lowell at first suspected it had been plagiarized.
In 1863 Burroughs gave up teaching to become a clerk in the Currency Bureau of the Treasury Department in Washington. There the young man of 26 met Walt Whitman, who was 18 years his senior. Of their friendship Burroughs wrote: "I owe more to him than to any other man in the world. He brooded me; he gave me things to think of; he taught me generosity, breadth, and an all-embracing charity." Notes on "Walt Whitman as Poet and Person" (1867), Burroughs's first book, was written in part by Whitman himself.
In his Washington years Burroughs gave himself up to an avid study of birds. His second book, "Wake-Robin" (1871), a collection of essays on birds, was given its title by Whitman. In 1871 the Treasury Department sent him to England, and he later recorded his impressions of that country in "Winter Sunshine" (1875). By the time the book appeared, Burroughs had left Washington and government service for a home he had built at West Park on the Hudson.
There he began fruit farming; he also began keeping the journal in which much of his finest prose was written. His son, Julian, was born in 1878; his wife died in 1917. Few other events disturbed the even pace of his domestic life on the farm, which was his laboratory, his inspiration, and the principal subject of the nature essays which made him famous.
"Locusts and Wild Honey" (1879) was the first book to reflect the more scientific and less poetic approach that Burroughs took toward nature in his mature work. In 1903 he traveled to Yellowstone Park with President Theodore Roosevelt, who had allied himself with the writer in a campaign for scientifically accurate observation in writing on nature. "Camping and Tramping with Roosevelt" (1907) recorded the trip.
In 1903, after publishing an article entitled "Real and Sham Natural History" in the Atlantic Monthly, Burroughs began a widely publicized literary debate known as the nature fakers controversy. Attacking popular writers of the day such as Ernest Thompson Seton, Charles G. D. Roberts and William J. Long for their fantastical representations of wildlife, he also denounced the booming genre of "naturalistic" animal stories as "yellow journalism of the woods". The controversy lasted for four years and involved American environmental and political figures of the day, including President Theodore Roosevelt, who was friends with Burroughs.
Attracted both to the poetic response to nature, which Emerson represented for him, and to its opposite, the scientific, which he admired in the writings of the English biologist T. H. Huxley, Burroughs found a reconciliation of the two in the work of French philosopher Henri Bergson. Bergson's influence is evident in such books as "Under the Apple-Trees" (1916) and "The Summit of the Years" (1917).
In February 1921 Burroughs underwent an operation to remove an abscess from his chest. Following this operation, his health steadily declined. Burroughs died on March 29, 1921 while on a train near Kingsville, Ohio. Burroughs was buried in Roxbury, New York on what would have been his 84th birthday, at the foot of a rock he had played on as a child and affectionately referred to as '’Boyhood Rock.'’ Since his death in 1921, John Burroughs has been commemorated by the John Burroughs Association. The association maintains the John Burroughs Sanctuary in Esopus, New York, a 170-acre plot of land surrounding Slabsides, and awards a medal each year to "the author of a distinguished book of natural history."
He became an atheist with an inclination towards pantheism.
Views
His philosophy was, "Each of you has the whole wealth of the universe at your very door, " and his writings were often based on observations made near his own home. Burroughs led the fight against this idea and demonstrated by his writings that nature's ways need no humanizing to make them fascinating. Burroughs developed a passion early for nature’s smaller details — preferring to investigate the song of a hermit thrush or the larder of a chipmunk over the vast Western vistas his contemporary John Muir sought out (they were known as the “two Johns” to their admiring public).
Quotations:
"A man can get discouraged many times, but he is not a failure until he begins to blame somebody else and stops trying."
"The Kingdom of heaven is not a place, but a state of mind."
"Leap, and the net will appear."
"A man can get discouraged many times, but he is not a failure until he begins to blame somebody else and stops trying."
Membership
American Academy of Arts and Letters
Personality
Physical Characteristics:
Burroughs enjoyed good physical and mental health during his later years until only a few months before his death when he began to experience lapses in memory and show general signs of advanced age including declining heart function.
Interests
From his youth, Burroughs was an avid fly fisherman and known among Catskill anglers.
Writers
Walt Whitman
Connections
At 20, he married Ursula North, but 2 years passed before his teaching yielded enough money for the couple to set up housekeeping. His son, Julian, was born in 1878. In 1901, Burroughs met an admirer, Clara Barrus. She was a physician with the state psychiatric hospital in Middletown. Clara was 37 and nearly half his age. She was the great love of his life and ultimately his literary executrix. She moved into his house after Ursula died in 1917.