Tonight, we’ll read a short story by John Burroughs called “The Exhilaration of the Road” that we first read in 2020. It is taken from a compilation titled “The Footpath Way”, an anthology for walkers, published in 1911.

John Burroughs was an American nature essayist, active in the U.S. conservation movement. In the words of his biographer Edward Renehan, Burroughs' special identity was less that of a scientific naturalist than that of "a literary naturalist with a duty to record his own unique perceptions of the natural world." The result was a body of work whose resonance with the tone of its cultural moment explains both its popularity at that time, and its relative obscurity since.

Burroughs accompanied many personalities of the time in his later years, including Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Ford (who gave him an automobile), and Thomas Edison. According to Ford, "John Burroughs, Edison, and I made several vagabond trips together. We went in motor caravans and slept under canvas.”

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