Description:
Friend of Walt Whitman, companion to Theodore Roosevelt, and friendly rival of John Muir, John Burroughs is seldom read today. But in the last decades of the 19th century, his prolific nature essays helped spawn the Nature Study movement and made him an international celebrity. In 1875 Henry James praised his "real genius" for natural history and called him a "more humorous, more available, and more sociable Thoreau." In this illustrated biography, Edward Kanze sketches the trajectory of Burroughs's long career, from his childhood on a farm in the Catskills to his decades in retirement along the Hudson River. As early as 1871, when his first book of nature essays was published, Burroughs was acclaimed as an American Gilbert White, the pioneering British naturalist and author of The Natural History of Selborne. Readers were charmed by Burroughs's enthusiastic accounts of ordinary walks made extraordinary by keen observation. By the late 1880s, when his first collection of nature essays for children was published, he was one of America's most popular interpreters of the natural world. He kept writing until 1921, when he died at the age of 84. Edward Kanze, a naturalist and writer, has written an engaging narrative that nevertheless leaves the reader hungry for more information. The photographs, though pleasant, are sometimes tangential: "mourning doves reminded Burroughs of their extinct relations, the passenger pigeons," reads one caption. The biography may succeed as an introduction to Burroughs's life, but in the end one wishes for more of the master's own prose and a better sense of its social context. --Pete Holloran
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