Fun Facts Friday: John Burroughs

John Burroughs (3 April, 1837 – 29 March, 1921) was an American naturalist and essayist.

Fun Facts about John Burroughs:

1. Born on a farm in the Catskill Mountains, Mr. Burroughs was the seventh of ten children.
2. To go to college, Mr. Burroughs worked as a teacher alternating studying and teaching.
3. The Atlantic Monthly published his first essay in 1860. Mr. Burroughs’ writing was so similar to the editor’s friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s that he thought, at first, that the piece was plagiarized.
4. Mr. Burroughs made his living as a federal bank examiner, along with writing and growing table grapes in a farm he bought in West Park, NY.
5. He was close friends with poet Walt Whitman, as well as President Theodore Roosevelt.
6. Mr. Burroughs loved to go fly fishing, since he was a young boy.
7. Mr. Burroughs’ biographer said that he was “a literary naturalist with a duty to record his own unique perceptions of the natural world.”
8. At the early 1900s, Mr. Burroughs renovated a farmhouse and called it Woodchuck Lodge, a National Historic Landmark since 1962.
9. Mr. Burroughs enjoyed a healthy life, until a few months before his death. He passed away in a train in Ohio.
10. He is buried at the foot of a rock, known as “Boyhood Rock”, which he played on as a child.

Zohar – Man of la Book