Old Mother West Wind and 6 Other Stories

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This special set of seven delightful books of warmth and whimsy take young readers to the Green Forest to meet Johnny Chuck, Bobby Raccoon, and other characters to learn gentle lessons about wildlife and the environment.

672 pages, Paperback

First published October 11,1996

About the author

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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.


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April 26,2025
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GENTLE LESSONS IN MORALITY

Published in 1910 these 16 short animal tales were written for the author's son. A dedicated conservationist from Cape Cod Burgess introduces young children to a rogues' gallery of critters--who learn lessons the hard way. Mother West Wind brings her own children, the merry little breezes, down to play each morning; what they watch the various animal characters do and say provides human children with simple, sometimes humorous advice on moral behavior--without being preachy. Hopefully future generations will appreciate and respect Nature the sooner for having been introduced to these amusing woodland characters with their all-too-human foibles.

The choice of illustrator makes these tales come alive, for they stimulate a childlike imagination in an age when too much is pre-programmed for kids. For early 20th century back-to-Nature tales I also recommend a sweet little book of animal stories called Hedgerow Tales by Enid Blyton.

(June 30, 2010. I welcome dialogue with teachers.)
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