page_title: John Burroughs
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: John Burroughs / Career
caption_attribution_description: Thomas Edison, John Burroughs, and Henry Ford, full-length portrait, standing, facing front, at Edison's home in Ft. Myers, Florida
context_page_description: John Burroughs 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.
context_section_description: 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.
  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. Four years later, the Boston house of Hurd & Houghton published Burroughs's first collection of nature essays, Wake-Robin.
  In January 1873, Burroughs left Washington for New York. The next year he bought a 9-acre (3.6 ha) farm in West Park, NY (now part of the Town of Esopus) where he built his Riverby estate. There he grew various crops before eventually focusing on table grapes.  He continued to write, and continued as a federal bank examiner for several more years. In 1895 Burroughs bought additional land near Riverby where he and son Julian constructed an Adirondack-style cabin that he called "Slabsides". At Slabsides he wrote, grew celery, and entertained visitors, including students from local Vassar College.  After the turn of the 20th century, Burroughs renovated an old farmhouse near his birthplace and called it "Woodchuck Lodge." This became his summer residence until his death.
  Burroughs accompanied many personalities of the time in his later years, including Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, Henry Ford (who gave him an automobile, one of the first in the Hudson Valley), Harvey Firestone, and Thomas Edison. In 1899, he participated in E. H. Harriman's expedition to Alaska.
  According to Ford, "John Burroughs, Edison, and I with Harvey S. Firestone made several vagabond trips together.  We went in motor caravans and slept under canvas."  Once we gypsied through the Adirondacks and again through the Alleghenies, heading southward."
  In 1901, Burroughs met an admirer, Clara Barrus (1864–1931). She was a physician with the state psychiatric hospital in Middletown, N.Y. Clara was 37 and nearly half his age. She was the great love of his life and ultimately his literary executrix. She moved into his house after Ursula died in 1917. She published Whitman and Burroughs: Comrades in 1931, relying on firsthand accounts and letters to documents Burroughs' friendship with poet Walt Whitman.
caption: Burroughs poses with Thomas Edison and Henry Ford at Edison's home in Ft. Myers, Florida, 1914.
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