Thornton Waldo Burgess (January 14, 1874 – June 5, 1965). Born in Sandwich, Cape Cod, Massachusetts, he was a conservationist and author of children's stories. Thornton Waldo Burgess loved the beauty of nature and its living creatures so much that he wrote about them for 50 years. By the time he retired, he had written more than 170 books and 15,000 stories for daily columns in newspapers.

Thornton Waldo Burgess was born on January 14, 1874, in Sandwich, Massachusetts. He was the son of Caroline F. Haywood and Thornton W. Burgess Sr., a direct descendant of Thomas Burgess, one of the first settlers of Sandwich, Massachusetts 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 of Thornton's stories in which he refers to Smiling Pool and the Old Briar Patch.

Graduating from Sandwich High School in 1891, Burgess attended a business college in Boston from 1892 to 1893. At the age of 17, Burgess briefly lived in Boston and then moved to Springfield, Massachusetts. He bought a place in Hampden, Massachusetts in 1925 and made it his permanent home in 1957. Returning frequently to Sandwich, Burgess claimed that to be his birth place and spiritual home. Many of his childhood experiences and the people he knew influenced his interest and concern for wildlife.