Thornton W. Burgess

Thornton Waldo Burgess (January 17, 1874 - June 5, 1965) was an American conservationist and author of children's stories. Burgess loved the beauty of nature and its living creatures so much that he wrote about them for 50 years in his books and in his newspaper column "Bedtime Stories." He was sometimes called the Storyteller. By the time he retired, he had written over 170 books and 15,000 short stories for a daily newspaper column. Burgess was born on January 17, 1874, in Sandwich, Massachusetts. He was the son of Caroline F. Haywood and Thornton W. Burgess, a direct descendant of Thomas Burgess, one of the first sandwich settlers in 1637. Thornton Sr. Dies. In the same year, his son was born, and the young Thornton Jr. was raised by his mother in Sandwich. They lived in modest circumstances. In his youth, he worked caring for cows, collecting laggards (May flowers) or berries, transporting water lilies from local ponds, selling sweets, and catch muskrats. William Chipman, one of his employers, lived on Discovery Hill Road, in the wild habitat of forests and wetlands. This habitat has become the site of many stories in which Burgess refers to The Smiling Pool and The Old Rosehip Patch. After graduating from Sandwich High School in 1891, Burgess studied briefly at a business college in Boston from 1892 to 1893, while living in Somerville, Massachusetts. But he did not like to study business and wanted to be an author. He moved to Springfield, Massachusetts, where he took a job as an assistant editor at the publishing company Phelps. His first stories were written under the pseudonym VB Thornton. Burgess married Nina Osbourne in 1905, but she died in childbirth a year later, leaving him to raise her son alone. It is said that he began to write bedtime stories to entertain his little son Thornton III. Burgess married in 1911; his wife Fanny had two children from a previous marriage. The couple later bought a house in Hampden, Massachusetts, in 1925, which became Burgess's permanent residence in 1957. His second wife died in August 1950. Burgess often returned to the Sandwich, which he always called his birthplace and spiritual home. Many of his childhood experiences and the people he knew there influenced his interest and inspired his concern for wildlife.