The Complete Writings of John Burroughs

New York: Wm. H. Wise & Co., 1924. First edition thus.

NEAR FINE: COMPLETE 23-VOLUME SET OF JOHN BURROUGHS WORKS: 1924 WAKE-ROBIN EDITION.

23 hardcover volumes, 7 ½ inches tall, dark green cloth bindings with embossed decorative cover and spine, image of Burrough's country home framed by trees and leaves, embossed title to spine, top edge gilt, deckled fore-edge, photographic frontispiece, 224 to 355 pages per book (total 6,355 pages), each in original dust jacket in protective mylar sleeve. Despite being over 100 years old, this complete set is unread, near-fine in very good dust jackets with only occasional loss on spines. The first volume, Wake-Robin, was first published in 1871 and subsequent volumes were published regularly until the final volume, The Last Harvest, was published in 1922. The final two volumes, Under the Maples and The Last Harvest, were published posthumously by Clara Barrus.

JOHN BURROUGHS (1837 – 1921) was an American naturalist and nature essayist, active in the conservation movement in the United States. The first of his essay collections was Wake-Robin in 1871. He was born on the family farm in the Catskill Mountains, near Roxbury in Delaware County, New York. In his later years he credited his life as a farm boy for his subsequent love of nature and feeling of kinship with all rural things. Burroughs had his first break as a writer in the summer of 1860 when the Atlantic Monthly, then a fairly new publication, accepted his essay Expression. In 1864, Burroughs accepted a position as a clerk at the Treasury; he would eventually become a federal bank examiner, continuing in that profession into the 1880s. All the while, he continued to publish essays and grew interested in the poetry of Walt Whitman. Burroughs met Whitman in Washington, D.C., in November 1863, and the two became close friends. Burroughs accompanied many personalities of the time in his later years, including Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, Henry Ford (who gave him an automobile, one of the first in the Hudson Valley), Harvey Firestone, and Thomas Edison. In 1899, he participated in E. H. Harriman's expedition to Alaska. Some of Burroughs' essays came out of trips back to his native Catskills. In the late 1880s, in the essay "The Heart of the Southern Catskills," he chronicled an ascent of Slide Mountain, the highest peak of the Catskills range. Speaking of the view from the summit, he wrote: "The works of man dwindle, and the original features of the huge globe come out. Every single object or point is dwarfed; the valley of the Hudson is only a wrinkle in the earth's surface."