John Burroughs
An American Naturalist
Edward J. Renehan, Jr.

The first full biography of the dean of American nature writers to be published since 1925.

"[Renehan reveals] a far more complex and interesting man than other biographers have described. ... In this thoughtful biography we are shown the once sainted 'Sage of Slabsides' as a flesh-and-blood traveler in a now-vanished world." -- The Sunday New York Times Book Review

John Burroughs (1837-1921) emerged from an obscure boyhood in the Catskill Mountains to write more than thirty books, create the genre of the nature essay, and become the preeminent nature writer of his day. In this critically-acclaimed biography, Edward J. Renehan, Jr. draws on a wealth of previously unpublished manuscripts, journals and letters to portray the man Henry James called "a more humorous, more available and more sociable Thoreau." In the process, Renehan reveals Burroughs's complex and enduring relationships with such notables as Jay Gould, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Edison, John Muir, Walt Whitman, Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Ford.

"Renehan's biography does precisely what it sets out to do: it provides the thorough, responsible, readable biography which has so long been wanting in Burroughs scholarship." -- American Nature Writing

"Burroughs ... could not have asked for a more inclusive or caring portrait."--Kirkus Reviews

384pp, 6x9, photos, index
Paper, $19.95 ISBN: 1-883789-16-8