Thornton W. Burgess

Thornton Waldo Burgess was born in 1874 in Sandwich, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. His father died the year he was born, and he was raised by his mother in humble circumstances. As a boy he earned money by tending cows, picking berries and mayflowers, selling candy and trapping muskrats. The woods and wetlands nearby became the setting of many stories, including the Smiling Pool and the Old Briar Patch. After high school he briefly attended a business college in Boston, but he wanted to be a writer and took a job as an editorial assistant at a publishing company in Springfield, Massachusetts. His first wife died a year after their marriage in 1905, leaving him to raise their son, and he is said to have begun writing bedtime stories to entertain the boy. His first book, Old Mother West Wind (1910), introduced animal characters such as Peter Rabbit, Jimmy Skunk and Sammy Jay. He went on to write more than 170 books and some 15,000 stories for his daily newspaper column, Bedtime Stories, and broadcast nature programmes on the radio. He was also a conservationist. He died in 1965.

Thornton W. Burgess is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: Faith not well documented. Source: Wikipedia