BURROUGHS, :roux (1837—). An Ameri can essayist and critic. lie was born at Rox bury, N. Y., April 3, 1837, the son of a farmer. He spent his youth between study and work in the field, and has said that his originality was fostered by growing up among people who neither read books nor cared for them. He was, however, a born author, and at fourteen began to write essays, which have remained always his favorite form of expression. His first efforts werclabored imitations of the ponderous lucubrations of Johnson; one of the first luxuries that he per mitted himself having been the purchase of that author's works. A more congenial inspiration soon came to him from Emerson, whose Essays and Miscellanies he assimilated eagerly, and at nineteen he succeeded in gaining admission to The Atlantic Monthly with an essay on Expres sions. After Emerson. to whom Burroughs as cribes the awakening of his religious nature and a revolution in his literary expression, the great influences in his literary life were two: Walt \\liftman, who was to him a great humanizing power, and Matthew Arnold. from whom lie gained clarity, alike in thought. and expression. All these influences came to him in their fullness before the publication of his first book, Walt Whitman as Port and Person (1867). Mean time, he had been engaged as teacher, as journal ist, and as an official of the Treasury Department at Washington (1863-73). He was for some years afterwards special national bank examiner. but during 1870-74 passed most of his time on a farm in Esopus, N. Y., where he divided his time
between fruit-culture and literature. Besides frequent contributions to periodicals, chiefly studies of nature and animal life, he wrote Wake Robin (1871) ; Winter Sunshine (1875) ; Birds and Poets (1877) ; Locusts and Wild Honey (1879) ; Pepaeton (1881); Fresh. Fields (1884) ; Signs and Seasons (1886) : Sharp Eyes (1SSS) indoor Studies (1889); Rirerby A Study (1897): The Light of Day (1900); Squirrels and. Other Fur-Bearers (1900). Bur roughs's work, whether as a critic of literature, as in his works on Walt Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau, or of religion, as in The Light of Day. most fully reveals the original personality of the man. They are strongly subjective, but they have found an enthusiastic response in a limited circle. In hooks, as in nature, it is the uncon ventional that appeals to him, and his own literary quality gains its fascination rather from the acuteness of his observation than from any elaboration in literary expression. He sees so clearly that lie makes his reader see the in dividualized lives of birds, flowers, fishes, and even insects. Burroughs is a horn naturalist, and his wide reading in English literature has been done with an eye to nature that gives to his similes and descriptive phrases a distinct literary flavor. Here his nearest analogue in English literature is White of Selborne. A collected edition of Burroughs's Works was begun in 1895.