One of the most prolific writers of nature stories for children, Thornton Waldo Burgess published over seventy books during his lifetime and for forty-four years wrote a daily story column--over 15,000 columns in all--for the Associated News and the New York Herald Tribune syndicates. His radio broadcasts and public lectures and readings brought the antics of Peter Rabbit, Johnny Chuck, Jimmy Skunk, and all the other denizens of the Green Meadow, the Smiling Pool, and the Green Forest before countless numbers of children and adults alike.

Born 14 January 1874 in Sandwich, Massachusetts, Burgess was to look back on his early years on Cape Cod with a longing for what he saw as a simpler time, one "before the era of too much and too fast." Because his father, Thornton Waldo Burgess, Sr., died when Burgess was nine months old and his mother, Caroline F. Hayward Burgess, was a semi-invalid, Burgess...