Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 - May 6, 1862; born 'David Henry Thoreau') was a noted American author and philosopher who is most famous for Walden, his essay on civil disobedience, and his call for the preservation of wilderness. Although considered by some to be a pacifist, he wrote a defense of the violent radical abolitionist John Brown, likening him to Jesus Christ.
He was born in Concord, Massachusetts, and graduated from Harvard in 1837. Thoreau never got a physical diploma from Harvard as he refused to pay the few dollars to get the "sheet of paper".
Thoreau was a philosopher of nature and its relation to the human condition. In his early years, he accepted the ideas of Transcendentalism, an eclectic philosophy that included among its advocates Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Bronson Alcott.
After college, Thoreau taught school, wrote essays and poems for The Dial, and briefly attempted freelance writing in New York City. The death of his brother in 1842 was a profound emotional shock and may have influenced his decision to live with his parents and never to marry.
Thoreau embarked on a two-year experiment in simple living on July 4, 1845 when he moved to a second-growth forest around the shores of beautiful Walden Pond, not far from his friends and family in Concord. He left Walden Pond on September 6, 1847 to live with his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emerson's family in Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau refused to pay taxes in 1846, based on his opposition to the Mexican War, and was later jailed. He described this event in his popular essay 'Civil Disobedience', which influenced Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi, and Martin Luther King.
Published in 1854, Walden; or, Life in the Woods recounts the two years and two months Thoreau spent at Walden Pond. The book compresses that time into a single calendar year, using the passage of four seasons to symbolize human development. Part memoir and part spiritual quest, this American classic emerged from a nine year process of composition and revision, the lengthy period in part because his previous work, A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers, had been so poorly received.
At various times, Thoreau earned a living by lecturing or working at his family's pencil factory. He invented a machine that simplified production while cutting costs. Later he converted the factory to producing plumbago, used to ink typesetting machines. Frequent contact with minute particles of lead may have weakened his lungs.
After 1850 he became a land surveyor, "travelling a good deal in Concord," and writing natural history observations about the 26 mile² (67 km²) township in his Journal, a two million word document that he kept for 24 years. He also traveled to Canada, Cape Cod, and Maine, landscapes that inspired his "excursion" books, A Yankee in Canada, Cape Cod, and The Maine Woods, in which travel intineraries frame his thoughts about geography, history, and philosophy.
Hailed as the first European-American environmentalist, Thoreau wrote essays on autumnal foliage, the succession of forest trees, and the disperal of seeds, collected in Excursions. Scientists regard these works as anticipating ecology, the study of interactions between species, places, and seasons. He was an early advocate of recreational hiking and canoeing, of conserving natural resources on private land, and of preserving wilderness as public land. Thoreau was also one of the first American supporters of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.
Thoreau was not without his critics. Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, "...Thoreau's content and ecstasy in living was, we may say, like a plant that he had watered and tended with womanish solicitude; for there is apt to be something unmanly, something almost dastardly, in a life that does not move with dash and freedom, and that fears the bracing contact of the world. In one word, Thoreau was a skulker. He did not wish virtue to go out of him among his fellow-men, but slunk into a corner to hoard it for himself. He left all for the sake of certain virtuous self-indulgences."
Thoreau died of tuberculosis in the town of his birth, Concord. He was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord.
Quotations
"In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagavat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Brahmin, priest of Brahma, and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water---jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges." (Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Civil Disobedience, Owen Thomas, ed. (New York, London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1966), p. 197).
See also
Bibliography
Online texts
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