Maxwell Struthers Burt

Maxwell Struthers Burt (October 18, 1882 Baltimore, Maryland – August 29, 1954, Jackson Hole, Wyoming), was an American novelist, poet, and short-story writer.

Life Struthers Burt grew up in Philadelphia, where he attended private schools and worked at a city newspaper. He graduated from Princeton University in 1904, then attended the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, and Merton College at the University of Oxford. After the war, he and his family began wintering in North Carolina.

The premise of Burt's fifth novel, Along these Streets, is a Westerner who inherits a large Philadelphia fortune, with the stipulation that he must move East and live in the city. Felix Bartain Macalister experiences the city's cultural traditions, and encounters various characters who attempt to guide or exploit him. Compared with contemporaneous novels, sociologist E. Digby Baltzell found it "… a far more sensitive portrait of Proper Philadelphia." This portrait, however, is painted in opposition to Proper Philadelphia's conservatism, which the main character readily acknowledges: "… I think I'm what might be called a radical liberal, but I'm for evolution, not revolution." At the end of the novel, Felix escapes and finds himself on horseback in ... Wyoming.

Burt's papers are housed at Princeton University and the University of Wyoming's American Heritage Center.

His son Nathaniel was also a published author, as is his grandson, Christopher C. Burt (b. 1954).

Nathaniel Burt wrote of his late father's novels: "There is always a love story, there is always a certain strict plotting of acceptance, withdrawal, misunderstanding, and final clinch that leads to much amusing discussion of the difference between men and women, but which does not escape a sort of artificiality."