Nathaniel Burt

Nathaniel Burt (November 21, 1913, Jackson Hole, Wyoming – July 1, 2003, Princeton, New Jersey) was an American composer, teacher, poet, novelist and social historian. A lecturer at Princeton University and Westminster Choir College, he is best remembered for his 1963 New York Times bestseller, The Perennial Philadelphians.

Life and career He was the son of writers Struthers Burt and Katharine Newlin Burt. His father grew up in Philadelphia, the son of a prominent lawyer, and was a graduate of Princeton and Oxford University. They operated the Bar B C Dude Ranch, outside Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where Nathaniel was born in 1913. He had a younger sister, Julia Burt Atteberry (1915–1986). Among their Wyoming neighbors was novelist (and Philadelphian) Owen Wister, who owned a nearby ranch.

Burt's parents lived in Southern Pines, North Carolina during the winters, where he attended elementary school. and graduated as valedictorian of his class in 1931. He completed an undergraduate degree at New York University's Mannes School of Music in 1939, Burt spent six years researching and writing The Perennial Philadelphians, a 625-page social history of the city's upper class from the 17th century to the 20th. Having grown up in Wyoming, North Carolina and Maryland, he was considered an outsider, "but Mr. Burt's roots led back to an old Philadelphia family much like those he chronicled." and made the New York Times bestseller list. Burt later wrote: "My best known book, like my father's has been a book about Philadelphia — precisely that Philadelphia from which my father and [Owen] Wister escaped to go West. Since I have never actually lived in Philadelphia, it has had something of the exotic glamour for me that Wyoming had for Wister."

Personal

Burt served on the board of directors of the Athenaeum of Philadelphia for many years, and was elected a Life Fellow. He was a member of the Princeton Club of New York, and the Century Association. The couple had two children, and lived in Princeton for more than 50 years. They were married for 62 years, until his death in 2003.

Nathaniel and Margaret Burt are buried with his parents and sister at Aspen Hill Cemetery, Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

Burt's papers are at Princeton University, including the diaries he kept for 70 years.

List of works Musical compositions Fruits of Solitude The Elegy of Lycidas Sets for Piano Margery's Garland 3 Madrigals Athenaeum of Philadelphia Waltz (1964) "Plus ca change, or, The Progress of Reform in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Opera as Illustrated in the Books of Three Operas," Studies in Music History, Harold Powers, ed. (Princeton University Press, 1958).

Philadelphia The Bonapartes in America (The Athenaeum of Philadelphia, 1960) The Perennial Philadelphians: The Anatomy of an American Aristocracy (1963, reprint 1999) (with Wallace E. Davies), "The Iron Age, 1876-1905," Philadelphia: A Three Hundred Year History, Russell Weigley, ed. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1981)

Princeton "Student Life at Nassau Hall," Nassau Hall 1756–1956, Henry Lyttleton Savage, ed. (Princeton University Press, 1956) "Struthers Burt '04: The Literary Career of a Princetonian," The Princeton University Library Chronicle, vol. 19, no. 3/4 (Spring-Summer 1958) "Browsing The New Jersey Historical Series," The Literary Heritage of New Jersey, Volume 20, Laurence B. Holland, ed. (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Company, 1964) "The Princeton Novel," The Princeton University Library Chronicle, Spring 1979 (with Margery P. Cuyler), A Short History of Trinity Church, Princeton, New Jersey (1982) "The Princeton Grandees," Princeton History, no. 3 (The Historical Society of Princeton, 1982) "An Exile in Princeton: The Letters of Charles Thomson," The Princeton University Library Chronicle, 1983 "Henry van Dyke: Poet of Genteel Princeton," Princeton History, no. 7 (The Historical Society of Princeton, 1988)

Wyoming War Cry of the West: The Story of the Powder River (1964). From the dust jacket: "Based on Struthers Burt's adult book, Powder River (1938), this lively volume by his son offers a true picture of the region where young imaginations have always loved to roam." Jackson Hole Journal (University of Oklahoma Press, 1983). Burt's recollections of seventy summers spent in Wyoming. Compass American Guide: Wyoming (1991). Published by Christopher C. Burt.

Cultural history First Families: The Making of an American Aristocracy (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1970). A group portrait of five prominent American families: the Adamses of Massachusetts, the Biddles of Philadelphia, the du Ponts of Delaware, the Lees of Virginia, and the Roosevelts of New York. Palaces for the People: A Social History of the American Art Museum (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1977). A chronicle of how the collections of American art museums were built.