Burr in Literature and Popular Culture
Burr appears as a character epitomizing worldly sophistication in Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1859 historical romance The Minister's Wooing.
Edward Everett Hale's 1863 story The Man Without a Country is about a fictional co-conspirator of Burr's, who is exiled for his crimes.
"The Aaron Burr Story", a second season (1965) episode of the television series Daniel Boone, starred Leif Erickson as ex-Vice President Aaron Burr attempting to set up an army to take over the western states. In the show, Burr's attempt to hire one of Daniel Boone's young impressionable friends as a wilderness guide is ultimately thwarted by Boone when a proclamation is published for Burr's arrest for treason against the United States.
The historical novel Burr, written in 1973, is the first (in historical chronology) volume in Gore Vidal's Narratives of Empire series.
"A Friend to Alexander", in James Thurber's My World and Welcome To It, transported the Burr–Hamilton rivalry into the twentieth century.
Eudora Welty wrote a story about the romance of Burr's Western expedition, "First Love", which appears in Selected Stories of Eudora Welty (Modern Library 1992).
In the comic book The Flash, a 1975 backup story featuring Green Lantern stars Burr. "The Man of Destiny", written by Dennis O'Neil and drawn by Dick Dillin, reveals that Burr was recruited by aliens to act as a leader for an interplanetary society in chaos. (The alliance cloned Burr, sending the clone back to earth to duel with Hamilton and live out of the rest of "Burr"'s life on earth).
In Michael Kurland's The Whenabouts of Burr (DAW, 1975) the protagonists chase across various alternate universes, trying to recover the Constitution of the United States, which has been stolen and replaced by an alternate signed by Aaron Burr instead of Alexander Hamilton.
In Orson Scott Card's alternate history / fantasy novel Seventh Son (1987), a character states that "... Aaron Burr got to be governor of Suskwahenny, before Daniel Boone shot him dead in ninety-nine."
A famous 1993 "Got Milk?" commercial directed by Michael Bay features a historian obsessed with the study of Aaron Burr—he owns the guns and the bullet from the duel. He is called by a radio station and offered a prize if he can name the person who killed Alexander Hamilton in the duel, but he has peanut butter in his mouth and is out of milk, and cannot manage to say "Aaron Burr" clearly enough to be heard before his time runs out.
In Alexander C. Irvine's 2002 novel A Scattering of Jades, Burr takes part in a plot to bring an ancient Aztec deity into power, explaining his interest in Mexico.
The Lonely Island's "Lazy Sunday" quotes the line "you can call us Aaron Burr from the way we're dropping Hamiltons", referring to the large number of ten dollar bills being spent and the duel between Burr and Alexander Hamilton referring to how Aaron Burr killed or "dropped" him.
In the alternate history short story "The War of '07" by Jayge Carr, contained in the collection Alternate Presidents, Burr is elected President in 1800, establishing an alliance with Napoleon Bonaparte and creates a family dictatorship. Upon his death in 1836, he is succeeded by his grandson Aaron Burr Alston, who previously served as his Vice President.
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Famous quotes containing the words burr, literature, popular and/or culture:
“Heaven sometimes hedges a rare character about with ungainliness and odium, as the burr that protects the fruit.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“As a man has no right to kill one of his children if it is diseased or insane, so a man who has made the gradual and conscious expression of his personality in literature the aim of his life, has no right to suppress himself any carefully considered work which seemed good enough when it was written. Suppression, if it is deserved, will come rapidly enough from the same causes that suppress the unworthy members of a man’s family.”
—J.M. (John Millington)
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Both cultures encourage innovation and experimentation, but are likely to reject the innovator if his innovation is not accepted by audiences. High culture experiments that are rejected by audiences in the creator’s lifetime may, however, become classics in another era, whereas popular culture experiments are forgotten if not immediately successful. Even so, in both cultures innovation is rare, although in high culture it is celebrated and in popular culture it is taken for granted.”
—Herbert J. Gans (b. 1927)