Green Meadow Stories

<p><strong>Thornton W. Burgess</strong> was an American naturalist and the author of dozens of books for children the most enduring of which are <strong><u>Old Mother West Wind</u></strong> and <strong><u>The Burgess Bird Book</u></strong> for Children. <strong>Burgess</strong> was a passionate twentieth-century conservationist who dedicated his life to teaching children and their families about the importance of the natural life of the northern <strong><u>North American</u></strong> forest. <strong><u>The Green Meadow Stories</u></strong> compilation is made up of four distinct but entwined tales: those of <strong><u>Happy Jack Squirrel</u></strong> Mrs. <strong>Peter Rabbit</strong> Bowser the Hound and <strong><u>Old Granny</u></strong> Fox. Through the adventures of these focal characters readers are introduced to the wider territory of the Green Meadows the Green Forest and the <strong><u>Smiling Pond</u></strong> as well as to the animals' Great World.The animals of <strong>Burgess</strong>'s stories are anthropomorphized undoubtedly but not caricatured: these are not the twee creatures of Disney cartoons. Their behaviour is explained in ways that would be understandable to a human child-this is fiction after all-but <strong>Burgess</strong>'s little people of the forest are not simply humans dressed in fur and feathers. The original illustrations in <strong>Burgess</strong>'s books (by <strong>Harrison Cady</strong> not reproduced in this edition) show the animals wearing clothes but <strong>Burgess</strong>'s own descriptions of animals are more natural and metaphorical and less fantastic. For example he describes Chatterer the Red Squirrel who always wears a red coat with vest of white a compact way of communicating the look of a squirrel that many of today's children will never have seen with their own eyes. Less pleasantly it is <strong>Peter Rabbit</strong>'s fur and flesh that is rent when Hooty the Owl tears <strong>Peter</strong>'s coat one night on the <strong>Old</strong> Pasture.<strong>Burgess</strong> has tremendous respect for the creatures he depicts as well as for their natural home. </p>