In addition to peddling the candy his mother made, he ran errands, shoveled snow, sold dandelion greens and blueberries, herded cows, delivered milk, and picked cranberries. In his autobiography,
Now I Remember (1960), Burgess describes his rural childhood in Wordsworthian terms: nature was his best teacher, and her first lesson was responsibility.
Though life for Burgess as a child was no bucolic idyll, he seems nevertheless to have invested his boyhood with a pastoral enchantment, remembering his days of rambling through meadows and woods and along the coast of Cape Cod as "halcyon." His nostalgia for this Edenic period of his youth provided, as Burgess admitted, the filter through which he subsequently viewed natural phenomena. Concerned in his stories that he not deviate from "the prosaic facts as Mother Nature presents them," he nevertheless could not avoid seeing these phenomena in the "enchanted atmosphere" of his boyhood on the Cape. This atmosphere pervades Burgess's works, set as they are in an idealized rural environment; through these works the reader enters a lost Arcadia and is made to sense that somewhere--perhaps in a wonderful, peculiarly New England past--life was once as he describes.
This is a free page. This page contains 184 words. This
biography contains 10,511 words (approx. 35 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Thornton Waldo Burgess Access Pass.
