selections from the writings of John Burroughs Burroughs, John, 1837-1921 Johnson, Clifton, 1865-1940 text text mau monographic Boston New York Houghton Mifflin company 1910 eng

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xi, [1], 250, [2] p. front., plates. 22 cm. John Burroughs was the most important practitioner after Thoreau himself of that especially American literary genre, the nature essay, and by the turn of the century he had become a virtual cultural institution in his own right: the Grand Old Man of Nature at a time when the American romance with the idea of nature, and the American conservation movement, had come fully into their own. His extraordinary popularity and popular visibility were sustained by a prolific stream of essay collections, beginning with Wake-Robin in 1871 (excerpted in this work). In the words of his biographer Edward J. Renehan, Burroughs's 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" (John Burroughs: An American Naturalist [Post Mills, Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 1992], p. 97); his essays stimulate the reader's own perceptions by blending the subjectivity of experience and feeling with the objectivity of the informed intellect and the faithfully accurate eye. The result was a body of work whose perfect resonance with the tone of its cultural moment perhaps explains both its enormous popularity at that time, and its relative obscurity since. Burroughs inspired a host of imitators, some of whom were fine writers in their own right, but it was he who set the standards of form--and of sensibility--for others to follow, whether as "literary naturalists" or simply as lovers of the natural world. This collection of essays about the author's beloved native Catskills contains material originally published across four decades; illustrated with telling photographs of Burroughs and his artfully natural world, it well represents the special qualities of his work. American Memory. The snow-walkers.--A white day and a red fox.--Phases of farm life.--In the hemlocks.--Birds' nests.--The heart of the southern Catskills.--Speckled trout.--A bed of boughs. with illustrations from photographs by Clifton Johnson. Natural history Outdoor books QH81 .B935 https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.gdc/gdclccn.10021755 10021755 DLC 841018 20250607233953.2 6350961 Converted from MARCXML to MODS version 3.8 using MARC21slim2MODS3-8_XSLT1-0.xsl (Revision 1.172 20230208)