Thornton W Burgess
Published: 2019-12-12
Total Pages: 62
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About Author: 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 books and his newspaper column, Bedtime Stories. He was sometimes known as the Bedtime Story-Man. By the time he retired, he had written more than 170 books and 15,000 stories for the daily newspaper column.Born January 17, 1874 in Sandwich, Massachusetts, Burgess was the son of Caroline F. Haywood and Thornton W. Burgess, Sr., a direct descendant of Thomas Burgess, one of the first Sandwich settlers in 1637. Thornton, Sr., died the same year his son was born, and the young Thornton, Jr. was brought up by his mother in Sandwich. They lived in humble circumstances. As a youth, he worked tending cows, picking trailing arbutus (mayflowers) or berries, shipping water lilies from local ponds, selling candy, and trapping muskrats. William C. Chipman, one of his employers, lived on Discovery Hill Road, a wildlife habitat of woodland and wetland. This habitat became the setting of many stories in which Burgess refers to Smiling Pool and the Old Briar Patch.Graduating from Sandwich High School in 1891, Burgess briefly attended a business college in Boston from 1892 to 1893, living in Somerville, Massachusetts, at that time. But he disliked studying business and wanted to be an author. He relocated to Springfield, Massachusetts, where he accepted a job as an editorial assistant at the Phelps Publishing Company. His first stories were written using the pseudonym W. B. Thornton.Burgess married Nina Osborne in 1905, but she died in childbirth a year later, leaving him to raise their son alone. It is said that he began writing bedtime stories to entertain his young son, Thornton III. Burgess remarried in 1911; his wife Fannie had two children by a previous marriage. The couple later bought a home in Hampden, Massachusetts in 1925, that became Burgess' permanent residence in 1957. His second wife died in August 1950. Burgess returned frequently to Sandwich, which he always claimed as his birthplace and spiritual home. Many of his childhood experiences and the people he knew there influenced his interest and were the impetus for his concern for wildlife. Source: Wikipedia Product Description: Very enjoyable book. This has the flavor of "Wind in the Willows" but with a little less description, and therefore more dialogue. My six year old loved it .The Adventures of Old Mr. Toad was acting strangely, and his behavior puzzled all the creatures of the Green Meadow. You see, he was in a hurry, and Old Mr. Toad NEVER hurried unless he was in danger. Where on earth could he be off to? To find out, Jimmy Skunk, Peter Cottontail, Unc' Billy Possum, and some other animals of the Green Forest secretly follow the old gentleman through the fields and woods as he makes his way to a very important engagement.Young readers will enjoy discovering Old Mr. Toad's destination in this delightful tale by master storyteller, Thornton W. Burgess. Set in the timeless fictional locale of the Green Forest and the Smiling Pool, this book transports today's youngsters to the same world of gentle breezes and lovable creatures that has delighted generations of children before then. There, they'll enjoy the warmth and whimsy of this tale while learning important lessons about nature, the environment, and the "lesser folk of fur and feathers."If you are doing any study of toads with your kids this is the book to read. It was so cute and fun. It taught about the habits of toads in a fun creative way. I will never forget some of the things I learned. I didn't pick up this book with that in mind. We were on vacation and all the big kids and dads were gone for the day so I scanned a friends bookshelf looking for a book that would take about 3 hours to read aloud and this was the winner.
