Wild Animals I Have Known

This best-selling book announced the arrival of a vastly popular new literary genre, of which Thompson was the virtual inventor and preeminent practitioner: the emotionally-gripping, fictional and anthropomorphic but supposedly realistic "nature story" with animal and bird heroes. (Thompson is perhaps better known as Ernest Thompson Seton, the name he adopted later in life.) Lesser followers, such as William J. Long, clearly carried sentimental anthropomorphism to the point of absurdity, and John Burroughs attacked Thompson/Seton himself as one such "nature faker" (he later apologized, but continued to insist on the strong fictional element in Thompson/Seton's work). Nevertheless, it is also clear that Thompson/Seton was genuinely committed to fostering a sense of moral obligation toward wildlife, and that through this and the string of similar books which followed over the next two decades, he enlisted the imaginative sympathies of tens of thousands of readers, whom soberer scientific writers and other conservationists would never have reached, in ardent concern for the natural world and its creatures.