Becoming America’s “Prophet of Outdoordom”: John Burroughs and the Profession of Nature Writing, 1856–1880

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.”¹ 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 woodsmoke 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.”²

Burroughs’s star faded considerably over the course of the twentieth century. But the past several decades have seen a resurgence of interest in his life and work. Several new biographies have appeared. His writing has been reprinted in new editions and anthologies.³ And scholars have begun to reappraise his work and its significance. Among the most notable of these new studies is Lawrence Buell’s magisterial The Environmental Imagination (1995), which argues for recognizing Burroughs’s importance not only among nature writers but also within the American literary tradition. James Perrin Warren’s monograph John Burroughs and the Place of Nature (2006) studies the writer’s influence upon American attitudes toward the natural world at the turn of the twentieth century. In 2007 the journal ATQ published two issues devoted entirely to Burroughs, with articles considering his work from a broad range of perspectives. And most recently, Burroughs plays a major role in Douglas Brinkley’s epic biography of Theodore Roosevelt, America’s first “naturalist president.”⁴

No doubt Burroughs’s career will continue to merit fresh consideration. In this essay I examine the years in which he established himself as a professional writer, paying close attention to how his 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 his 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.

Emerson and the Atlantic

Burroughs’s earliest authorial ambitions were shaped in equal parts by Emerson and The...