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Book Review
| John Burroughs and the Place of Nature. By James Perrin Warren. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006. xiii + 266 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth $39.95.
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| John Burroughs, it appears, is having a bit of a renaissance. A century removed from his life, the once famous champion of environmental literature long lingered in the shadows of the greats—Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau. A decade ago Edward Renehan began Burroughs' resurrection with his biography, John Burroughs: An American Naturalist. Now, with this new volume by Washington and Lee University English professor James Perrin Warren, Burroughs finally receives the full credit he deserves. |
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As the title suggests, this is almost as much a detailed analysis of early nature writing as a pure biography. Warren notes the fame Burroughs's almost thirty books won him in his day, from textbooks to the pinnacles of political power. He notes Burroughs's friendship with, and influence on, Theodore Roosevelt and Burroughs's complex relationship with John Muir plays a key role. He even notes at the outset that Burroughs sensed that his fame would not long outlive him, the product, Burroughs assumed, of the new "motion-picture brain." Warren also explores, however, the fact that Burroughs wrote in the same tradition as his predecessors. The interweaving of culture and nature—"the place of nature"—permeated and defined their writing, albeit from different perspectives. For Burroughs, this involved his home along the Hudson River and the Catskills Mountains, the one area where his fame never waned. Building upon the likes of Thoreau, critically considering their work in his, Burroughs popularized ruminations over nature and man as a literary genre. He helped launch ecocriticism at a time when rapid industrialization and urbanization threatened nature's place as never before. His work kept his predecessors alive for a new generation |
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Warren is obviously well-versed in the genre of environmental literature, quoting liberally from a spectrum of writers to draw his conclusions about Burroughs. The subject may appear a bit esoteric for the general reader, but Warren's fluid writing style makes it an easy read. In fact, the book's greatest strength may lie in its ability to reach those with only a cursory knowledge of the field. One does not need to have read Muir, Roosevelt, or the others—or Burroughs—to appreciate Warren's argument. Warren documents his conclusions well, his notes illustrating the breadth of his research. As he acknowledges in the introduction, his work is necessarily interdisciplinary and demands a strong command of culture and political history as much as literature and natural history. His success should find this book a large audience, from classes in English to history. It represents solid scholarship and an important contribution to the literature. |
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J. Brooks Flippen is professor of history at Southeastern Oklahoma State University and the author of Nixon and the Environment (New Mexico, 2000) and Conservative Conservationist: Russell E. Train and the Emergence of American Environmentalism (Louisiana State, 2000). |
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