Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862) was an American essayist, poet, naturalist and philosopher, a leading figure of the New England transcendentalist movement. [1] He is best known for Walden, a reflection on two years spent living simply in a cabin beside Walden Pond, and for the essay usually titled "Civil Disobedience," which argues that individuals are obliged to refuse cooperation with unjust government. [2] His observations of the natural world also make him an early figure in American environmental thought.
Early life and education
Thoreau was born on 12 July 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts, the town with which he remained identified for his entire life. [1] His family ran a pencil-manufacturing business, and he worked in it intermittently, introducing improvements to the graphite used in their pencils.
He attended Harvard College, graduating in 1837, where he studied classics, rhetoric and languages. Returning to Concord, he briefly taught school with his brother John, running an academy that emphasised nature walks over corporal punishment. Through Ralph Waldo Emerson, who became a mentor and employer, he entered the circle of transcendentalist writers and contributed to their journal The Dial. [3]
Walden
In July 1845 Thoreau moved into a small cabin he had built on land owned by Emerson at Walden Pond, on the edge of Concord, where he lived for two years and two months. He grew beans, kept careful accounts of his expenses, read, walked and wrote, seeking to test how little a person needed in order to live deliberately. [4]
The resulting book, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, was published in 1854 after years of revision. Structured around the cycle of a single year, it mixes practical economics, natural observation, and argument against a life spent accumulating possessions. Its reputation grew slowly, and it is now regarded as a central work of American literature. [2] An earlier book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), drawn from a boat trip with his brother, sold poorly.
Civil disobedience and abolitionism
In 1846 Thoreau was jailed overnight for refusing to pay a poll tax, a protest against a government that upheld slavery and was then prosecuting the Mexican-American War. A relative paid the tax against his wishes and he was released. [1] The lecture he developed from the episode was published in 1849 as "Resistance to Civil Government," later widely reprinted as "Civil Disobedience."
Thoreau was an active abolitionist. He assisted people escaping slavery on the Underground Railroad and spoke publicly against the Fugitive Slave Act. After the raid on Harpers Ferry he delivered "A Plea for Captain John Brown," defending Brown at a time when the raid was widely condemned. [3]
Natural history and later years
From the 1850s Thoreau devoted increasing effort to detailed natural observation, filling a journal of some two million words with records of plants, ice, birds and the seasonal cycle around Concord. His studies of seed dispersal and forest succession anticipated later ecological science, and his phenological records have been used by modern researchers studying climate change. [4] Excursions to Maine, Cape Cod and Canada produced material published mostly after his death.
He contracted tuberculosis, which he had suffered from intermittently since his college years, and died in Concord on 6 May 1862 at the age of forty-four.
Legacy
"Civil Disobedience" influenced Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., among many others, and remains a standard reference in discussions of conscientious objection and nonviolent resistance. [2] Walden has shaped environmental and simple-living movements, and Walden Pond is preserved as a state reservation. Thoreau was elected to the Hall of Fame for Great Americans in 1960. [1]
