John Burroughs – American naturalist

John Burroughs was an American naturalist, writer, artist and philosopher. He was one of America’s most honored writers at the beginning of the 20th century.
John Burroughs was born on April 3, 1837. He was the seventh of 10 children. The boy lived on a family’s dairy farm in the valleys of the Catskill Mountains, near Roxbury, New York. Burroughs spent his boyhood exploring the lush countryside.
At the age of sixteen he left school and became a teacher. At the age of 20, he married Ursula North. He was 23 when James Russell Lowell accepted his essay Expression for the Atlantic Monthly.

In 1863 he left for Washington, DC, where he worked as a clerk in the U.S. Treasury Department. In Washington he met poet Walt Whitman, who was 18 years his senior, and began to develop his writing style.
In 1867 Burroughs published his first book, Notes on Walt Whitman as a Poet and Person.
In 1871 the Treasury Department sent him to England, and he later recorded his impressions of that country in Winter Sunshine (1875).
His son, Julian, was born in 1878 and his wife died in 1917.
By the late 1800s, Burroughs had returned to New York where he met with John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford.
In 1903 he traveled to Yellowstone Park with President Theodore Roosevelt and in 1907 he published his book Camping and Tramping with Roosevelt.
John Burroughs died on March 29, 1921 in Kingsville, Ohio.
During the life of the naturalist philosopher was sold 1.5 million copies of his works.