The Mother West Wind Collection, Volume 2, Burgess

Old Mother West Wind

by Thornton W. Burgess, Harrison Cady (Illustrator)

“The Mother West Wind Collection, Volume 2” continues the stories of the inhabitants of the Green Meadow and the Green Forest. Follow Peter Rabbit down the Crooked Little Path to the Smiling Pool as he heads over to visit old Grandfather Frog in the hope

394 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Thornton W. (Waldo) Burgess (1874-1965), American author, naturalist and conservationist, wrote popular children's stories including the Old Mother West Wind (1910) series. He would go on to write more than 100 books and thousands of short-stories during his lifetime.

Thornton 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," depicting memories of his early life in Sandwich, as well as his career highlights. 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 in Hampden, Massachusetts.

Reviews

[Louie the Mustache Matos · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have a huge sense of nostalgia for the Burgess books because they're the first books I remember my father reading to my brother, Marc, and I, almost nightly dressed in our pajamas, lying together in the lower bunk. The truth is that dad would read from the Bedtime Stories series, so the Mother West Wind stuff came later, but T. W. Burgess became a favored author as a consequence of that nostalgia.

This second volume of the Mother West Wind Collection contains some of Harrison Cady's historically gorgeous illustrations. He was not available for the first half of the series but came aboard in the latter half and never looked back, because he became known as a collaborating partner whenever Burgess was mentioned, Cady's name was not far behind.

This latter half of the collection contains the questioning stories. Burgess tried to write his nature stories in a way that unified these animal stories thematically. Here, each book collects stories that question "Why?" "How?" "When?" Where?" Each chapter is a story that answers the story title, "Why is Striped Chipmunk proud of his stripes?" In this book are included all the stories that answer the Why of it all? Such then are the How? book, the Where? book, and When?

I love these books, not just for the inventive stories, but the way I felt listening while dad read. This is entirely subjective. My sons didn't like them, but I believe they still have value.