John Burroughs
Edited and with Critical Commentary by Jeff Walker
Paper $24.95 | 0-8156-0875-6 | 2006
A vital new edition of John Burroughs’s Signs and Seasons featuring
introductory commentary, revealing how these timeless essays resonate
with the environmental issues of today.
Reviews
"This new edition of a work by John Burroughs celebrates his pioneering role in a new school of nature writing in the nineteenth century. . . . This collection of essays includes a wide range of subjects describing Burroughs’ intimate observations of nature close to home, told in a simple, timeless literary style. . . . Readers are sure to chuckle over such wise comments as ‘Dogmatism about nature, or about anything else, very often turns out to be an ungrateful cur that bites the hand that reared it.‘"
 Chicago Botanic Garden
Description
Renowned as a pioneer of the new school of nature writing and among the most widely read authors of his time, John Burroughs has had a profound influence on our appreciation of nature. Signs and Seasons, originally published in 1886, provides an excellent introduction to the extensive work of one of America's great writers. Because the essays were collected and arranged by Burroughs himself, they offer a synoptic view of his complex and many-sided genius. Signs and Seasons covers a wide range of Burroughs’s interests, including plants and animals, the wilderness, pastoral landscapes, and the methods and goals of the naturalist.
An authoritative new introduction by Jeff Walker makes Burroughs’s work relevant to the twenty-first century, not only through Burroughs’s excellent natural history writing but also through his beliefs about community, sustainability, and social justice. Additional notes give historical and scientific context for each essay and offer the reader fresh insight into his work. Walker’s intimate knowledge of the Hudson River valley, Riverby, and Slabsides, the areas about which Burroughs writes, reveals sympathy for, and understanding of, Burroughs’s work. This edition will be indispensable to the devotee of John Burroughs’s writing and to a new generation of environmental reader.
Editor
Jeff Walker is an associate professor of geology and environmental studies at Vassar College. He lives in Hyde Park, New York.
5 x 7, 376 pages, introduction, bibliography
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Syracuse University Press
