Riverby - Burroughs, John

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Résumé :
Riverby is a book written by American naturalist John Burroughs, first published in 1904. It was written at Burroughs' estate of the same name, which is located on the west bank of the Hudson river, in Ulster County, New York. There, he also wrote Fresh Fields (1884), Signs and Seasons (1886), and Indoor Studies (1889). This fantastic volume constitutes a must-read for fans and lovers of nature writing, and it is not to be missed by collectors of Burroughs' seminal work. John Burroughs (1837 - 1921) was an American naturalist, essayist, and active member of the U.S. conservation movement. Burroughs' work was incredibly popular during his lifetime, and his legacy has lived on in the form of twelve U.S. Schools named after him, Burroughs Mountain, and the John Burroughs Association-which publicly recognizes well-written and illustrated natural history publications. Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. We are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author.

Biographie:
John Burroughs (April 3, 1837 - March 29, 1921) was an American naturalist and nature essayist, active in the U.S. conservation movement. The first of his essay collections was Wake-Robin in 1871.
In the words of his biographer Edward Renehan, Burroughs' 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. The result was a body of work whose resonance with the tone of its cultural moment explains both its popularity at that time, and its relative obscurity since
Burroughs had his first break as a writer in the summer of 1860 when the Atlantic Monthly, then a fairly new publication, accepted his essay Expression. Editor James Russell Lowell found the essay so similar to Emerson's work that he initially thought Burroughs had plagiarized his longtime acquaintance. Poole's Index and Hill's Rhetoric, both periodical indexes, even credited Emerson as the author of the essay.
In 1864, Burroughs accepted a position as a clerk at the Treasury; he would eventually become a federal bank examiner, continuing in that profession into the 1880s. All the while, he continued to publish essays, and grew interested in the poetry of Walt Whitman. Burroughs met Whitman in Washington, DC in November 1863, and the two became close friends.[8]
Whitman encouraged Burroughs to develop his nature writing as well as his philosophical and literary essays. In 1867, Burroughs published Notes on Walt Whitman as Poet and Person, the first biography and critical work on the poet, which was extensively (and anonymously) revised and edited by Whitman himself before publication.[9] Four years later, the Boston house of Hurd & Houghton published Burroughs's first collection of nature essays, Wake-Robin.

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