John Burroughs - naturalist, ornithologist, author, poet, and teacher - is perhaps best remembered today as one of the earliest and most articulate pioneers of what is now known as the conservation movement in the United States. Burroughs published twenty-eight books between 1867 and 1922, writing about literature as well as nature, and earning a popularity in his time as great as that of his contemporaries and kindred spirits, Henry David Thoreau and John Muir. Many of. his writings are still in print. Born in 1837 in the Catskill Mountains of New York State and a longtime resident of the Hudson River Valley, Burroughs spent his life studying the natural world around him - from birds and bees to flowers and trees - and putting his thoughts on paper. His powerful verbal landscapes and philosophical insights into the natural world during the height of the Industrial Revolution were read by hundreds of thousands of people - from powerful. industrialists to countless schoolchildren. He counted among his friends the poet Walt Whitman, the pioneering preservation President, Teddy Roosevelt, Thomas Edison, and Andrew Carnegie. Henry Ford, whose own farmland upbringing Burroughs's writing recalled, not only gave the writer a Model T car and went camping with him, but also purchased his boyhood homestead, which Burroughs and other relatives were having trouble maintaining, and deeded it to his friend. Author Ed. Kanze, himself a naturalist, writer, and photographer, sheds new light on Burroughs's enormous contribution to how we think about our environment. His biographical text is enhanced by many quotations from Burroughs's essays and poems and, uniquely, by conversations with Burroughs's granddaughter, who contributed numerous affectionate recollections of her grandfather as well as many archival photographs of him, his farm and woodland writing studio, "Slabsides," and family. and friends - including Muir, Roosevelt, Ford, Edison, and others. The text is further enlivened with crisp color photographs by Ed Kanze that evoke the landscapes Burroughs knew and loved and the many birds, animals, and plants that he wrote about with such intimacy and feeling. Burroughs's world truly comes alive again in the words and pictures of this book.