BURROUGHS, JOHN (1837-1921), American poet and writer on natural history, was born near Roxbury, in Delaware county (N.Y.), April 3, 1837. In his earlier years he engaged in various pursuits—teaching, journalism, farming, and fruit-raising, and for nine years was a clerk in the treasury department at Washington. After publishing in 1867 a volume of Notes on W alt Whitman as poet and person (a subject to which he returned in 1896 with his Whitman: a Study) he began in 1871, with Wake Robin, a series of books on birds, flowers, and rural scenes which has made him the successor of Thoreau as a popular essayist on the plants and animals environing human life. His later writings showed a more philosophic mood and a greater disposition toward literary or meditative allusion than their predecessors, but the general theme and method remained the same. His chief books, in addition to Wake-Robin, are Birds and Poets (1877), Locusts and Wild Honey (1879), Signs and Seasons (1886), and Ways of Nature (1905) ; these are in prose, but he wrote much also in verse, a volume of poems, Bird and Bough, being published in 1906. Winter Sunshine (1875) and Fresh Fields (1884) are sketches of travel in England and France. Until his death, March 29, 1921, while returning from California to his country home in New York State, he continued to write frequent essays on out-of-door life, some of which were assembled in the follow ing volumes : Time and Change (1912), The Summit of the Years (1913), The Breath of Life (1915), Under the Apple Trees (1916), and Field and Study (1919).
BIBLIOGRAPHY.-John Burroughs, My Boyhood (1922) ; John BurBibliography.-John Burroughs, My Boyhood (1922) ; John Bur- roughs' Talks, His Reminiscences and Comments as reported by Clifton Johnson (1922) ; Clara Barrus, The Life and Letters of John Bur roughs (1925) ; Clara Barrus, The Heart of Burroughs' Journals (1928).