Robert Burton was an English author and fellow of Oxford University, best known for The Anatomy of Melancholy, first published in 1621. The book is a digressive, labyrinthine work that he wrote partly to ease his own melancholy, and its final edition ran to more than 500,000 words, packed with quotations from classical and contemporary authorities. Burton sometimes wrote under the pen name Democritus Junior, and he spent much of his life among Oxford's libraries, serving as librarian of Christ Church Library from 1624 until his death in 1640.
