1998. 356 pp. Paperback in As-New condition. Corners are sharp, pages are crisp, clean, and without flaw. John Burroughs emerged from an obscure boyhood in the Catskill Mountains to write more than thirty books, create the genre of the nature essay, and become the preeminent nature writer of his day. In this critically-acclaimed biography, Edward J. Renehan, Jr. draws on a wealth of previously unpublished manuscripts, journals and letters to portray the man Henry James called 'a more humorous, more available, and more sociable Thoreau.' In the process, Renehan reveals Burroughs's complex and enduring relationships with such notables as Jay Gould, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Edison, John Muir, Walt Whitman, Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Ford.