In the second half of the nineteenth century, John Burroughs was the most popular and significant nature writer in America. During the Civil War, he became a close confidant of Walt Whitman and later one of the poet's most successful advocates. Over the next two decades, he emerged as one of the most highly prized authors in Houghton, Mifflin's prestigious catalog and was widely regarded as the pioneer of the recently emerged field of writing that treated "nature in a half-scientific and half-poetical way." By the first decade of the new century, he had become a national celebrity—a friend of presidents and tycoons, an icon of teachers and schoolchildren, and the country's special ambassador to the natural world. He represented not only the highest level of literary achievement, but also the simple, rural life that many middle-class Americans now claimed as their national heritage. Schools were founded in his name. Readers organized John Burroughs societies dedicated not only to reading the author's works but also to bird-watching and other activities with which he was associated. Writing shortly after Burroughs's death in 1921, Hamlin Garland offered a portrait of Burroughs as many Americans knew him in the final years of his life. "He smelled of wood smoke and wild berries. He was tanned with wind and sun and his hands were calloused by farm labor," writes Garland. "But when he took his pen in his fist he became the master of English which makes his pages a delight. . . . In the door of an old barn, with a dry-goods box for a desk, he penned the most lucid, powerful, artistic prose—prose that has not been surpassed by any other nature writer in America."
In this essay I examine the years in which he established himself as a professional writer, paying close attention to how Jus interests and influences were shaped by the prevailing forces in mid-century literary culture. To this point, Burroughs's early years generally have been portrayed as a journey of writerly discovery, as an apprenticeship during which he struggled to locate his authentic voice and interests. This approach, I think, misses perhaps the most fascinating and important aspect of Burroughs's early career—namely, his efforts to match Jus own literary aims and ambition with what the rapidly changing postbellum literary market would allow. This process involved far more than merely identifying nature as his primary subject and negotiating the influence of Emerson and Thoreau. In a new era for authors and publishers, Burroughs was the first American to make a profession of writing nature essays in the recently established general-interest magazines, and he did so well before anyone thought such essays comprised a distinct literary tradition. It behooves us to ask how Burroughs arrived at this particular career, and how he made it pay.
Burroughs's earliest authorial ambitions were shaped in equal parts by Emerson and The Atlantic Monthly. Burroughs first read Emerson in the spring of 1856, when he was nineteen years old and studying for a term at the Cooperstown Senminary in New York. At first, he found the elder writer's work difficult. Reading Emerson's Essays, he later wrote, like “tasted green apples." A year later, however, Burroughs returned to Emerson and within the space of several months read every tiling by Emerson that he could find. The experience proved to be a watershed in Jus life and career. As he later noted, he read Emerson "in a sort of ecstasy," and "for a long time afterward I lived, moved, and had my being" in his works. "I was like Jonah in the whale's belly—completely swallowed by them. They were almost my whole intellectual diet for two or three years… For years all that I wrote was Emersonian. It was as if I was dipped in Emerson."
Burroughs's early infatuation can hardly be overstated. As James Perrin Warren has recently shown, Burroughs's journals reveal that the elder writer's influence was both immediate and profound. What literary aims he had were only vaguely realized. In 1856, however, as Burroughs encountered Emerson for the first time, the nature of his journals changed abruptly. During these months, Burroughs's desire both to write and to win fame as a writer gained considerable focus and intensity.
Of course, Burroughs was hardly alone in his intense admiration of Emerson. What Whitman said of his own early encounter—"I was simmering, simmering, simmering; Emerson brought me to a boil"—seems to have been the case for any number of aspiring American writers in the mid-nineteenth century. As one critic later wrote in Scribner's, it was during this period that Emerson's "magnetism" was "deflecting more or less nearly all the young and rising writers, and making them, by necessity, talk through a medium in which they had been powerfully quickened, and had learned how to think." This was Burroughs's experience exactly, and over the next several years, as he taught at a number of common schools in both New York and New Jersey, he continued to channel the elder writer. Indeed, nearly all of Burroughs's work from this period seems an attempt to speak as Emerson. Still drunk on Emerson, Burroughs wrote a series of entries in his journal on the subjects of genius and poetry: Poetry is spiritual facts represented by natural symbols; hence the most poetic writer, as well as the most pleasing and instructive, is he who conveys his ideas and illustrations drawn from natural objects, who makes the world of matter mirror forth the world of mind, who translates things into thought. Nature when rightly seen is but a representation of the spirit; its face is radiant with celestial smiles and to him who is pure and true to the law of his being "it speaks a various language."
Burroughs quotes William Cullen Bryant's "Thanatopsis" at the end of this passage, but again the argument is wholly derived from Emerson. Indeed, here we find, many of Emerson's central assumptions expressed in a short space—that the most vital language is that which draws on natural figures; that the natural world and the human mind correspond to one another; and finally, that it is the poet's task to reveal the natural world as an allegory of the spiritual.
The important thing here is not that Burroughs embraced Emersonian philosophy. Rather, it is that Burroughs, like so many aspiring writers of his generation, realized himself as an author through Emerson's influence. Emerson was the central organizing presence in Burroughs's early career, much as Hawthorne was in the careers of William Dean Howells and Henry James. As Richard Brodhead has shown, for Howells and James, Hawthorne established and represented the work that they sought to continue. Hawthorne's precedent was, for them, "almost synonymous with literature itself: to undertake the writer's work at this time is to join in an activity that Hawthorne is incorporated in the idea of, and so inevitably to enter into an intercourse with him." So it was for Burroughs with Emerson. As Burroughs later wrote, he had "caught the contagion of writing and of authorship" early in life. But it was only after reading Emerson that he knew how to begin this work.
1. "The Writings of John Burroughs," The Atlantic Monthly 76 (1895), 703.
2. Hamlin Garland, "Burroughs the Man" in Public Meeting of the American Academy and the National Institute of Arts and Letters in Honor of John Burroughs (New York: American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1922), 48-52.
3. See Edward Renehan, John Burroughs: An American Naturalist (Post Mills, VT: Chelsea Green, 1992)
4. Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Gulture (Cambridge: Belknap Press)
5. Attributed to Whitman in John Townsend Trowbridge, "Reminiscences of Walt Whitman," The Atlantic Monthly 89 (1902), 165.