William J. Long

William Joseph Long (1867–1952) was an American clergyman, naturalist and author. Born in Massachusetts and educated at Harvard, Andover and Heidelberg, he served as a Congregational minister in Connecticut and spent his summers in the woods of Maine and Canada, which he described in a series of nature books, Ways of Wood Folk, Wilderness Ways, School of the Woods and others, that were widely used in schools. Their accounts of animal behavior drew him into the nature fakers controversy of 1903 to 1907, in which John Burroughs and Theodore Roosevelt attacked him for sentimental invention. His textbooks English Literature and American Literature were used in high schools for decades.