Robert Burton

Robert Burton was born in 1577 into a wealthy family of the rural gentry. He was a scholar who studied and worked for most of his life in Christ Church CollegeHe lived in Oxford. He never married, rarely traveled "except with maps" or through the descriptions of others, led a sedentary, solitary, and discreet life – and wrote poems in Latin and two plays (of which only one satire is known). Confined to his office in the university library, he dedicated himself to his great obsession: Anatomy of Melancholy, a book published in 1621, and on which he continued to work for two decades, not to correct or alter it, but to expand upon it throughout the five editions it had during his lifetime. Only his death, in 1640, prevented him from continuing.