Mother West Wind Why Stories (Illustrated)

by Thornton W. Burgess, Harrison Cady (Illustrator)

Overview

Why are certain animals able to do things that others cannot? Why do some look one way and others another? While some of the answers to these questions may be obvious to some adults, through his genius, Burgess manages to provide answers that children can understand, even if they are not biologically or evolutionarily accurate. The stories and illustrations are simply wonderful, and they make great bedtime stories.

This edition of the book contains the eight, original, rejuvenated illustrations, and an additional two time- and place relevant, and unique to this edition.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940015700855
Publisher:	Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1915
Publication date:	09/13/2012
Series:	Classic Books for Children , #43
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	10 MB
Age Range:	3 - 5 Years

About the Author

Thornton Waldo Burgess (January 14, 1874 – June 5, 1965) was a 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 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 W. Burgess, Sr., died the same year his son was born, and the young Thornton Burgess was brought up by his mother in Sandwich. They both lived in humble circumstances with relatives or paying rent. As a youth, he worked year round in order to earn money. Some of his jobs included tending cows, picking trailing arbutus 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 write. He moved to Springfield, Massachusetts, where he took a job as an editorial assistant at the Phelps Publishing Company. His first stories were written under the pen name W. B. Thornton.

Burgess married Nina Osborne in 1905, but she died only 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.

In 1960, Burgess published his last book, Now I Remember, Autobiography of an Amateur Naturalist. That same year, Burgess, at the age of 86, had published his 15,000th story. He died on June 5, 1965, at the age of 91.