John Burroughs Biography Quotes 29 Report mistakes

Early Life
John Burroughs was born on April 3, 1837, in Roxbury, a farming community in New York's Catskill Mountains. Raised in a large household grounded in subsistence work, he developed early habits of outdoor observation that shaped his lifetime of close watching of birds, plants, and seasonal change. While the demands of farm labor were constant, he found time for reading and schooling in the district schools, and as a young man he taught classes in nearby towns. His early writing attempts included essays that sought to translate field observations into plain but vivid prose, a style he continued to refine throughout his career. In 1857 he married Ursula North, a teacher of steady temperament whose practicality helped steady his early professional life as he moved between teaching and clerical posts while continuing to write.

Washington Years and Literary Emergence
During the Civil War era Burroughs secured a position as a clerk in the U.S. Treasury Department in Washington, D.C. The city exposed him to writers, editors, and reformers, and it was there that he met Walt Whitman. The two men walked and talked across the city's neighborhoods and riverbanks, forging a friendship that influenced Burroughs's confidence as a writer and his view of American literature. Burroughs's first book, Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person (1867), defended the poet's achievements and helped introduce Whitman to a broader audience at a time of controversy.

Burroughs's reputation as a nature essayist took shape with Wake-Robin (1871), a collection of bird and field sketches notable for their clarity and unfussy precision. He published regularly in journals such as The Atlantic Monthly and Scribner's Monthly, earning a readership that valued his patient attention to ordinary species and familiar landscapes. Though sometimes compared with Henry David Thoreau, whom he admired and wrote about candidly, Burroughs emphasized the tested fact and the day's walk over the philosophical abstraction, pairing a receptive spirit with empiricism.

Riverby, Slabsides, and the Working Writer
In 1873 Burroughs left federal service and settled along the Hudson River at West Park, New York. He and Ursula established Riverby, a working farm and home overlooking the river, where he cultivated grapes and berries while continuing to write. Nearby he built a rough-hewn retreat he called Slabsides, a place to work undisturbed, entertain visitors, and take long rambles through the swamps and ridges. From this base he issued a steady stream of books: Winter Sunshine (1875), Birds and Poets (1877), Locusts and Wild Honey (1879), Pepacton (1881), Fresh Fields (1884), and Signs and Seasons (1886). These volumes deepened his signature approach: short walks turned into close readings of the natural world, with the prose shaped by rhythm, restraint, and humor.

Travel abroad informed several essays in Fresh Fields, while return trips to the Catskills revived his sense of home ground. He wrote prefaces and essays on literary figures while maintaining a primary fidelity to field notes and seasonal diaries. Friends and neighbors visited Slabsides, and students and editors sought him out for his ability to connect natural history to the textures of daily life.

Friendships, Public Life, and Debates
Burroughs's circle broadened at the turn of the century. He remained loyal to Whitman's memory, publishing Whitman: A Study (1896). He became friendly with Theodore Roosevelt, who admired his writing and invited him on western travels, including a 1903 visit to Yellowstone. Burroughs's Camping and Tramping with Roosevelt (1906) recounts portions of their outings and conversations about birds, big game, and American landscapes. He also met and corresponded with John Muir, sharing with him a devotion to wild country even as their temperaments differed.

From 1903 to 1907 he stood at the center of the so-called nature fakers controversy, criticizing popular animal stories that, in his view, sentimentalized or fabricated animal behavior. He singled out writers such as William J. Long and, at times, Ernest Thompson Seton, urging that observation and evidence should anchor nature writing. Roosevelt publicly sided with Burroughs, and the debate sharpened public standards for natural history in print.

Industrialists and inventors also gathered around him in his later years. He joined Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Harvey Firestone on a series of well-publicized camping trips, where his expertise about trees and birds leavened conversations about machines and modern life. The contrasting presences of Roosevelt's energetic public example and Whitman's expansive poetic vision gave Burroughs a cultural position that bridged literary salons, scientific readers, and a popular audience curious about the outdoors.

Ideas, Family, and Later Work
Although best known for nature essays, Burroughs explored philosophical themes, drawing on evolutionary thought to articulate an earth-centered spirituality. Books such as The Light of Day (1900), Leaf and Tendril (1908), Time and Change (1912), The Summit of the Years (1913), The Breath of Life (1915), and Under the Apple-Trees (1916) consider the relation between mind and nature, the continuity of life, and the adequacy of scientific explanations to human experience. He argued for a realism grounded in sensory fact, wary of dogma, whether theological or literary.

Life at Riverby included a family dimension. John and Ursula's son, Julian Burroughs, born in 1878, became an artist and writer, sometimes assisting with illustrations and sharing in the Hudson River landscapes that sustained the family. Ursula North Burroughs, practical and reserved, managed domestic affairs and the farm through decades of visitors and deadlines; she died in 1917. In the last decades of his life, the physician and writer Clara Barrus became Burroughs's closest confidante, companion, and later literary executor. She preserved his correspondence, recorded conversations, and after his death shaped a comprehensive account of his life and letters.

Final Years and Legacy
In old age Burroughs divided his time between Riverby and Woodchuck Lodge, a summer home near his boyhood haunts in Roxbury. He continued to publish essays well into his eighties, and collections such as Under the Maples (1921) affirmed the continuity of his themes: attention to the near-at-hand, trust in patient inquiry, and gratitude for the ordinary miracles of migration, bloom, and weather. On March 29, 1921, while returning east from a trip to California, he died on a train near Kingsville, Ohio. He was brought back to the Catskills and buried near the "boyhood rock" that had anchored so many of his early memories.

John Burroughs's legacy rests on the union of clear style and verifiable observation. He helped move American nature writing toward a standard in which charm did not excuse inaccuracy and in which the local walk could open into large questions of science and spirit. The homes he made at Riverby and Slabsides, the friendships he cultivated with figures such as Walt Whitman, Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and Harvey Firestone, and the devoted stewardship of Clara Barrus all insured that his books would endure. In the span between Wake-Robin and his final essays, he gave readers a way to see the living world with steadiness, wonder, and fact in balance.

Our collection contains 29 quotes who is written by John, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Motivational - Wisdom - Truth - Never Give Up.

• 1886 Signs and Seasons (Collection)
• 1884 Fresh Fields (Collection)
• 1877 Birds and Poets (Collection)
• 1871 Wake-Robin (Collection)