Thornton Burgess Books in Order: 20 Animal Stories Free Online
Thornton W. Burgess wrote around 170 books and 15,000 newspaper columns about the animals of the Green Meadows and the Green Forest, and he is the best writer of read-aloud chapters anybody has produced. The reason is structural: every chapter is three or four pages, ends somewhere you can stop, and contains one true fact about a real animal — what a skunk actually eats, how a beaver actually builds. A generation of American children learned field natural history off them without noticing.
If you read to a child at bedtime and want something that is not exhausting, this is the shelf. Twenty of his books are in the free library. Here they are grouped by series, with reading order inside each.
Start here: the Mother West Wind books
These came first, from 1910, and they are the most fairy-tale-ish of his work — the animals sit around and explain how they got their tails.
1. Old Mother West Wind (1910) — the first book, sixteen short stories, and still the best entry point for a four- or five-year-old. 2. Mother West Wind's Children 3. Mother West Wind "Why" Stories — origin stories. Why Jimmy Skunk wears stripes, why Bobby Coon has rings on his tail. 4. Mother West Wind "How" Stories — the same shape, one question further along.
The Bedtime Story-Books
Burgess's central achievement: one small animal per volume, twenty to thirty very short chapters, published between 1913 and 1919. Each one stands completely alone, so you can start with whichever animal a child likes. Nine are here.
- The Adventures of Reddy Fox — the first of them, and the one that sets the pattern.
- The Adventures of Johnny Chuck — a woodchuck, and quietly the most touching, because it is about leaving home.
- The Adventures of Jerry Muskrat — has an actual antagonist in Farmer Brown's boy and a dam under threat.
- The Adventures of Unc' Billy Possum — written in a heavy dialect that has dated badly; worth knowing before you read it aloud.
- The Adventures of Grandfather Frog — the funniest, mostly because Grandfather Frog is enormously vain.
- The Adventures of Old Mr. Toad — the best of the nine on pure natural history; the chapter on what a toad's tongue does is a small lesson.
- The Adventures of Paddy the Beaver — a beaver builds a pond and changes the whole neighbourhood. Effectively a book about ecology written in 1917.
- The Adventures of Poor Mrs. Quack — a duck who has been shot at, and Burgess arguing against spring hunting inside a bedtime story. He campaigned on this for decades and won.
- The Adventures of Jimmy Skunk — the one children request again.
The other eleven in the series — Peter Cottontail, Buster Bear, Sammy Jay, Prickly Porky, Bob White and the rest — are not in the library yet.
The Green Meadow and Green Forest books
Slightly longer, aimed a year or two older, with a continuous plot rather than episodes.
- Happy Jack — Happy Jack Squirrel, and a plot about hoarding.
- Mrs. Peter Rabbit — Peter goes looking for a wife and gets lost doing it.
- Old Granny Fox — Reddy's grandmother, who is cleverer than he is. The best-plotted book Burgess wrote.
- Whitefoot the Wood Mouse — a deer mouse, and startlingly tense for a book about a mouse.
- Blacky the Crow — the closest thing in the series to a villain given his own book, and Burgess plays fair with him.
The two he wrote to teach
Not stories. These are natural history for children in the same voice, and they hold up as first field guides.
- The Burgess Bird Book for Children — Peter Rabbit meets a hundred-odd North American birds, one per chapter, each described well enough to identify from. Still recommended by birders.
- The Burgess Animal Book for Children — the same for mammals, from shrews to moose.
How to read them aloud
The chapters are three pages for a reason — one is a bedtime, two is a treat. Do not try to read a whole book in a sitting; the rhythm is the point, and it collapses if you rush it. And the animals recur across every series, so a child who has met Reddy Fox in one book will greet him in the next, which is most of why the shelf works.
Everything above is public domain and free to read in the browser here, no download and no account needed to start. His books sit on two author pages because the catalogue records his name two ways: Thornton W. (Thornton Waldo) Burgess and Thornton W. Burgess.
For more of the same: 33 animal stories for children and 76 books that are part of a series, or our guide to free classic books for kids.