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Henry David Thoreau

February 05, 2023

"Thoreau" redirects here. For other uses, see Thoreau (disambiguation).

Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) was an American naturalist, essayist, poet, and philosopher.[3] A leading transcendentalist,[4] he is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay "Civil Disobedience" (originally published as "Resistance to Civil Government"), an argument for disobedience to an unjust state.

Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau in 1856
Born
David Henry Thoreau

(1817-07-12)July 12, 1817
Concord, Massachusetts, U.S.
DiedMay 6, 1862(1862-05-06) (aged 44)
Concord, Massachusetts, U.S.
Alma materHarvard College
Era19th-century philosophy
RegionWestern philosophy
SchoolTranscendentalism[1]
Main interests
Notable ideas
Influences
Influenced
Signature

Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry amount to more than 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions are his writings on natural history and philosophy, in which he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern-day environmentalism. His literary style interweaves close observation of nature, personal experience, pointed rhetoric, symbolic meanings, and historical lore, while displaying a poetic sensibility, philosophical austerity, and attention to practical detail.[5] He was also deeply interested in the idea of survival in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay; at the same time he advocated abandoning waste and illusion in order to discover life's true essential needs.[5]

Thoreau was a lifelong abolitionist, delivering lectures that attacked the fugitive slave law while praising the writings of Wendell Phillips and defending the abolitionist John Brown. Thoreau's philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced the political thoughts and actions of such notable figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.[6]

Thoreau is sometimes referred to as an anarchist.[7][8] In "Civil Disobedience", Thoreau wrote: "I heartily accept the motto,—'That government is best which governs least;' and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe,—'That government is best which governs not at all;' and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. ... But, to speak practically and as a cit­i­zen, unlike those who call themselves no-gov­ernment men, I ask for, not at once no gov­ernment, but at once a better government."[9]

Pronunciation of his name

Amos Bronson Alcott and Thoreau's aunt each wrote that "Thoreau" is pronounced like the word thorough (/ˈθʌroʊ/ THURR-oh—in General American,[10][11] but more precisely /ˈθɔːroʊ/ THOR-oh—in 19th-century New England). Edward Waldo Emerson wrote that the name should be pronounced "Thó-row", with the h sounded and stress on the first syllable.[12] Among modern-day American English speakers, it is perhaps more commonly pronounced /θəˈroʊ/ thə-ROH—with stress on the second syllable.[13][14]

Physical appearance

Thoreau had a distinctive appearance, with a nose that he called his "most prominent feature".[15] Of his appearance and disposition, Ellery Channing wrote:[16]

His face, once seen, could not be forgotten. The features were quite marked: the nose aquiline or very Roman, like one of the portraits of Caesar (more like a beak, as was said); large overhanging brows above the deepest set blue eyes that could be seen, in certain lights, and in others gray,—eyes expressive of all shades of feeling, but never weak or near-sighted; the forehead not unusually broad or high, full of concentrated energy and purpose; the mouth with prominent lips, pursed up with meaning and thought when silent, and giving out when open with the most varied and unusual instructive sayings.

Life

Early life and education, 1817–1837

 
Thoreau's birthplace, the Wheeler-Minot Farmhouse in Concord, Massachusetts

Henry David Thoreau was born David Henry Thoreau[17] in Concord, Massachusetts, into the "modest New England family"[18] of John Thoreau, a pencil maker, and Cynthia Dunbar. His father was of French Protestant descent.[19] His paternal grandfather had been born on the UK crown dependency island of Jersey.[20] His maternal grandfather, Asa Dunbar, led Harvard's 1766 student "Butter Rebellion",[21] the first recorded student protest in the American colonies.[22] David Henry was named after his recently deceased paternal uncle, David Thoreau. He began to call himself Henry David after he finished college; he never petitioned to make a legal name change.[23]

He had two older siblings, Helen and John Jr., and a younger sister, Sophia Thoreau.[24] None of the children married.[25] Helen (1812–1849) died at age 37,[25] from tuberculosis. John Jr. (1814–1842) died at age 27,[26] of tetanus after cutting himself while shaving.[27] Henry David (1817–1862) died at age 44, of tuberculosis.[28] Sophia (1819–1876) survived him by 14 years, dying at age 56,[25] of tuberculosis.[29]

He studied at Harvard College between 1833 and 1837. He lived in Hollis Hall[30] and took courses in rhetoric, classics, philosophy, mathematics, and science.[31] He was a member of the Institute of 1770[32] (now the Hasty Pudding Club). According to legend, Thoreau refused to pay the five-dollar fee (approximately equivalent to $136 in 2021) for a Harvard master's diploma, which he described thus: Harvard College offered it to graduates "who proved their physical worth by being alive three years after graduating, and their saving, earning, or inheriting quality or condition by having Five Dollars to give the college".[33] He commented, "Let every sheep keep its own skin",[34] a reference to the tradition of using sheepskin vellum for diplomas.

Thoreau's birthplace still exists on Virginia Road in Concord. The house has been restored by the Thoreau Farm Trust,[35] a nonprofit organization, and is now open to the public.

Return to Concord, 1837–1844

The traditional professions open to college graduates—law, the church, business, medicine—did not interest Thoreau,[36]: 25  so in 1835 he took a leave of absence from Harvard, during which he taught at a school in Canton, Massachusetts, living for two years at an earlier version of today's Colonial Inn in Concord. His grandfather owned the earliest of the three buildings that were later combined.[37] After he graduated in 1837, Thoreau joined the faculty of the Concord public school, but he resigned after a few weeks rather than administer corporal punishment.[36]: 25  He and his brother John then opened the Concord Academy, a grammar school in Concord, in 1838.[36]: 25  They introduced several progressive concepts, including nature walks and visits to local shops and businesses. The school closed when John became fatally ill from tetanus in 1842 after cutting himself while shaving.[38][39] He died in Henry's arms.[40]

Upon graduation Thoreau returned home to Concord, where he met Ralph Waldo Emerson through a mutual friend.[18] Emerson, who was 14 years his senior, took a paternal and at times patron-like interest in Thoreau, advising the young man and introducing him to a circle of local writers and thinkers, including Ellery Channing, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, and Nathaniel Hawthorne and his son Julian Hawthorne, who was a boy at the time.

Emerson urged Thoreau to contribute essays and poems to a quarterly periodical, The Dial, and lobbied the editor, Margaret Fuller, to publish those writings. Thoreau's first essay published in The Dial was "Aulus Persius Flaccus",[41] an essay on the Roman poet and satirist, in July 1840.[42] It consisted of revised passages from his journal, which he had begun keeping at Emerson's suggestion. The first journal entry, on October 22, 1837, reads, "'What are you doing now?' he asked. 'Do you keep a journal?' So I make my first entry to-day."[43]

Thoreau was a philosopher of nature and its relation to the human condition. In his early years he followed transcendentalism, a loose and eclectic idealist philosophy advocated by Emerson, Fuller, and Alcott. They held that an ideal spiritual state transcends, or goes beyond, the physical and empirical, and that one achieves that insight via personal intuition rather than religious doctrine. In their view, Nature is the outward sign of inward spirit, expressing the "radical correspondence of visible things and human thoughts", as Emerson wrote in Nature (1836).

 
1967 U.S. postage stamp honoring Thoreau, designed by Leonard Baskin

On April 18, 1841, Thoreau moved in with the Emersons.[44] There, from 1841 to 1844, he served as the children's tutor; he was also an editorial assistant, repairman and gardener. For a few months in 1843, he moved to the home of William Emerson on Staten Island,[45] and tutored the family's sons while seeking contacts among literary men and journalists in the city who might help publish his writings, including his future literary representative Horace Greeley.[46]: 68 

Thoreau returned to Concord and worked in his family's pencil factory, which he would continue to do alongside his writing and other work for most of his adult life. He resurrected the process of making good pencils with inferior graphite by using clay as a binder.[47] The process of mixing graphite and clay, known as the Conté process, had been first patented by Nicolas-Jacques Conté in 1795. Thoreau made profitable use of a graphite source found in New Hampshire that had been purchased in 1821 by his uncle, Charles Dunbar. The company's other source of graphite had been Tantiusques, a mine operated by Native Americans in Sturbridge, Massachusetts. Later, Thoreau converted the pencil factory to produce plumbago, a name for graphite at the time, which was used in the electrotyping process.[48]

Once back in Concord, Thoreau went through a restless period. In April 1844 he and his friend Edward Hoar accidentally set a fire that consumed 300 acres (120 hectares) of Walden Woods.[49]

"Civil Disobedience" and the Walden years, 1845–1850

 
Thoreau sites at Walden Pond

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion."

— Henry David Thoreau, "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For", in Walden[50]

Thoreau felt a need to concentrate and work more on his writing. In 1845, Ellery Channing told Thoreau, "Go out upon that, build yourself a hut, & there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no other alternative, no other hope for you."[51] Thus, on July 4, 1845, Thoreau embarked on a two-year experiment in simple living, moving to a small house he had built on land owned by Emerson in a second growth forest around the shores of Walden Pond. The house was in "a pretty pasture and woodlot" of 14 acres (5.7 hectares) that Emerson had bought,[52] 1+1⁄2 miles (2.5 kilometers) from his family home.[53] Whilst there, he wrote his only extended piece of literary criticism, "Thomas Carlyle and His Works".[54]

 
Original title page of Walden, with an illustration from a drawing by Thoreau's sister Sophia

On July 24 or July 25, 1846, Thoreau ran into the local tax collector, Sam Staples, who asked him to pay six years of delinquent poll taxes. Thoreau refused because of his opposition to the Mexican–American War and slavery, and he spent a night in jail because of this refusal. The next day Thoreau was freed when someone, likely to have been his aunt, paid the tax, against his wishes.[6] The experience had a strong impact on Thoreau. In January and February 1848, he delivered lectures on "The Rights and Duties of the Individual in relation to Government",[55] explaining his tax resistance at the Concord Lyceum. Bronson Alcott attended the lecture, writing in his journal on January 26:

Heard Thoreau's lecture before the Lyceum on the relation of the individual to the State—an admirable statement of the rights of the individual to self-government, and an attentive audience. His allusions to the Mexican War, to Mr. Hoar's expulsion from Carolina, his own imprisonment in Concord Jail for refusal to pay his tax, Mr. Hoar's payment of mine when taken to prison for a similar refusal, were all pertinent, well considered, and reasoned. I took great pleasure in this deed of Thoreau's.

— Bronson Alcott, Journals[56]

Thoreau revised the lecture into an essay titled "Resistance to Civil Government" (also known as "Civil Disobedience"). It was published by Elizabeth Peabody in the Aesthetic Papers in May 1849. Thoreau had taken up a version of Percy Shelley's principle in the political poem "The Mask of Anarchy" (1819), which begins with the powerful images of the unjust forms of authority of his time and then imagines the stirrings of a radically new form of social action.[57]

At Walden Pond, Thoreau completed a first draft of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, an elegy to his brother John, describing their trip to the White Mountains in 1839. Thoreau did not find a publisher for the book and instead printed 1,000 copies at his own expense; fewer than 300 were sold.[44]: 234  He self-published on the advice of Emerson, using Emerson's publisher, Munroe, who did little to publicize the book.

 
Reconstruction of the interior of Thoreau's cabin
 
Replica of Thoreau's cabin and a statue of him near Walden Pond

In August 1846, Thoreau briefly left Walden to make a trip to Mount Katahdin in Maine, a journey later recorded in "Ktaadn", the first part of The Maine Woods.

Thoreau left Walden Pond on September 6, 1847.[44]: 244  At Emerson's request, he immediately moved back to the Emerson house to help Emerson's wife, Lidian, manage the household while her husband was on an extended trip to Europe.[58] Over several years, as he worked to pay off his debts, he continuously revised the manuscript of what he eventually published as Walden, or Life in the Woods in 1854, recounting the two years, two months, and two days he had spent at Walden Pond. The book compresses that time into a single calendar year, using the passage of the four seasons to symbolize human development. Part memoir and part spiritual quest, Walden at first won few admirers, but later critics have regarded it as a classic American work that explores natural simplicity, harmony, and beauty as models for just social and cultural conditions.

The American poet Robert Frost wrote of Thoreau, "In one book ... he surpasses everything we have had in America."[59]

The American author John Updike said of the book, "A century and a half after its publication, Walden has become such a totem of the back-to-nature, preservationist, anti-business, civil-disobedience mindset, and Thoreau so vivid a protester, so perfect a crank and hermit saint, that the book risks being as revered and unread as the Bible."[60]

Thoreau moved out of Emerson's house in July 1848 and stayed at a house on nearby Belknap Street. In 1850, he moved into a house at 255 Main Street, where he lived until his death.[61]

In the summer of 1850, Thoreau and Channing journeyed from Boston to Montreal and Quebec City. These would be Thoreau's only travels outside the United States.[62] It is as a result of this trip that he developed lectures that eventually became A Yankee in Canada. He jested that all he got from this adventure "was a cold".[63] In fact, this proved an opportunity to contrast American civic spirit and democratic values with a colony apparently ruled by illegitimate religious and military power. Whereas his own country had had its revolution, in Canada history had failed to turn.[64]

Later years, 1851–1862

 
Thoreau in 1854

In 1851, Thoreau became increasingly fascinated with natural history and narratives of travel and expedition. He read avidly on botany and often wrote observations on this topic into his journal. He admired William Bartram and Charles Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle. He kept detailed observations on Concord's nature lore, recording everything from how the fruit ripened over time to the fluctuating depths of Walden Pond and the days certain birds migrated. The point of this task was to "anticipate" the seasons of nature, in his word.[65][66]

He became a land surveyor and continued to write increasingly detailed observations on the natural history of the town, covering an area of 26 square miles (67 square kilometers), in his journal, a two-million-word document he kept for 24 years. He also kept a series of notebooks, and these observations became the source of his late writings on natural history, such as "Autumnal Tints", "The Succession of Trees", and "Wild Apples", an essay lamenting the destruction of the local wild apple species.

With the rise of environmental history and ecocriticism as academic disciplines, several new readings of Thoreau began to emerge, showing him to have been both a philosopher and an analyst of ecological patterns in fields and woodlots.[67][68] For instance, "The Succession of Forest Trees", shows that he used experimentation and analysis to explain how forests regenerate after fire or human destruction, through the dispersal of seeds by winds or animals. In this lecture, first presented to a cattle show in Concord, and considered his greatest contribution to ecology, Thoreau explained why one species of tree can grow in a place where a different tree did previously. He observed that squirrels often carry nuts far from the tree from which they fell to create stashes. These seeds are likely to germinate and grow should the squirrel die or abandon the stash. He credited the squirrel for performing a "great service ... in the economy of the universe."[69]

He traveled to Canada East once, Cape Cod four times, and Maine three times; these landscapes inspired his "excursion" books, A Yankee in Canada, Cape Cod, and The Maine Woods, in which travel itineraries frame his thoughts about geography, history and philosophy. Other travels took him southwest to Philadelphia and New York City in 1854 and west across the Great Lakes region in 1861, when he visited Niagara Falls, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Mackinac Island.[70] He was provincial in his own travels, but he read widely about travel in other lands. He devoured all the first-hand travel accounts available in his day, at a time when the last unmapped regions of the earth were being explored. He read Magellan and James Cook; the arctic explorers John Franklin, Alexander Mackenzie and William Parry; David Livingstone and Richard Francis Burton on Africa; Lewis and Clark; and hundreds of lesser-known works by explorers and literate travelers.[71] Astonishing amounts of reading fed his endless curiosity about the peoples, cultures, religions and natural history of the world and left its traces as commentaries in his voluminous journals. He processed everything he read, in the local laboratory of his Concord experience. Among his famous aphorisms is his advice to "live at home like a traveler".[72]

After John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, many prominent voices in the abolitionist movement distanced themselves from Brown or damned him with faint praise. Thoreau was disgusted by this, and he composed a key speech, A Plea for Captain John Brown, which was uncompromising in its defense of Brown and his actions. Thoreau's speech proved persuasive: the abolitionist movement began to accept Brown as a martyr, and by the time of the American Civil War entire armies of the North were literally singing Brown's praises. As a biographer of Brown put it, "If, as Alfred Kazin suggests, without John Brown there would have been no Civil War, we would add that without the Concord Transcendentalists, John Brown would have had little cultural impact."[73]

 
Thoreau in his second and final photographic sitting, August 1861.

Death

Thoreau contracted tuberculosis in 1835 and suffered from it sporadically afterwards. In 1860, following a late-night excursion to count the rings of tree stumps during a rainstorm, he became ill with bronchitis.[74][75][76] His health declined, with brief periods of remission, and he eventually became bedridden. Recognizing the terminal nature of his disease, Thoreau spent his last years revising and editing his unpublished works, particularly The Maine Woods and Excursions, and petitioning publishers to print revised editions of A Week and Walden. He wrote letters and journal entries until he became too weak to continue. His friends were alarmed at his diminished appearance and were fascinated by his tranquil acceptance of death. When his aunt Louisa asked him in his last weeks if he had made his peace with God, Thoreau responded, "I did not know we had ever quarreled."[77]

 
Grave of Thoreau at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord
 
Geodetic Marker at Thoreau's gravesite

Aware he was dying, Thoreau's last words were "Now comes good sailing", followed by two lone words, "moose" and "Indian".[78] He died on May 6, 1862, at age 44. Amos Bronson Alcott planned the service and read selections from Thoreau's works, and Channing presented a hymn.[79] Emerson wrote the eulogy spoken at the funeral.[80] Thoreau was buried in the Dunbar family plot; his remains and those of members of his immediate family were eventually moved to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts.

Nature and human existence

Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

— Thoreau[81]

Thoreau was an early advocate of recreational hiking and canoeing, of conserving natural resources on private land, and of preserving wilderness as public land. He was himself a highly skilled canoeist; Nathaniel Hawthorne, after a ride with him, noted that "Mr. Thoreau managed the boat so perfectly, either with two paddles or with one, that it seemed instinct with his own will, and to require no physical effort to guide it."[82]

He was not a strict vegetarian, though he said he preferred that diet[83] and advocated it as a means of self-improvement. He wrote in Walden, "The practical objection to animal food in my case was its uncleanness; and besides, when I had caught and cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me essentially. It was insignificant and unnecessary, and cost more than it came to. A little bread or a few potatoes would have done as well, with less trouble and filth."[84]

 
Thoreau's famous quotation, near his cabin site at Walden Pond

Thoreau neither rejected civilization nor fully embraced wilderness. Instead he sought a middle ground, the pastoral realm that integrates nature and culture. His philosophy required that he be a didactic arbitrator between the wilderness he based so much on and the spreading mass of humanity in North America. He decried the latter endlessly but felt that a teacher needs to be close to those who needed to hear what he wanted to tell them. The wildness he enjoyed was the nearby swamp or forest, and he preferred "partially cultivated country". His idea of being "far in the recesses of the wilderness" of Maine was to "travel the logger's path and the Indian trail", but he also hiked on pristine land. In the essay "Henry David Thoreau, Philosopher" Roderick Nash wrote, "Thoreau left Concord in 1846 for the first of three trips to northern Maine. His expectations were high because he hoped to find genuine, primeval America. But contact with real wilderness in Maine affected him far differently than had the idea of wilderness in Concord. Instead of coming out of the woods with a deepened appreciation of the wilds, Thoreau felt a greater respect for civilization and realized the necessity of balance."[85]

Of alcohol, Thoreau wrote, "I would fain keep sober always. ... I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man; wine is not so noble a liquor. ... Of all ebriosity, who does not prefer to be intoxicated by the air he breathes?"[84]

Sexuality

Thoreau never married and was childless. In 1840, when he was 23, he proposed to eighteen-year old Ellen Sewall, but she refused him, on the advice of her father.[86]

Thoreau's sexuality has long been the subject of speculation, including by his contemporaries. Critics have called him heterosexual, homosexual, or asexual.[87][88] There is no evidence to suggest he had physical relations with anyone, man or woman. Some scholars have suggested that homoerotic sentiments run through his writings and concluded that he was homosexual.[87][89][90] The elegy "Sympathy" was inspired by the eleven-year-old Edmund Sewall, who had just spent five days in the Thoreau household in 1839.[91] One scholar has suggested that he wrote the poem to Edmund because he could not bring himself to write it to Edmund's sister Anna,[92] and another that Thoreau's "emotional experiences with women are memorialized under a camouflage of masculine pronouns",[93] but other scholars dismiss this.[87][94] It has been argued that the long paean in Walden to the French-Canadian woodchopper Alek Therien, which includes allusions to Achilles and Patroclus, is an expression of conflicted desire.[95] In some of Thoreau's writing there is the sense of a secret self.[96] In 1840 he writes in his journal: "My friend is the apology for my life. In him are the spaces which my orbit traverses".[97] Thoreau was strongly influenced by the moral reformers of his time, and this may have instilled anxiety and guilt over sexual desire.[98]

Politics

 
John Brown "Treason" Broadside, 1859

Thoreau was fervently against slavery and actively supported the abolitionist movement.[1] He participated as a conductor in the Underground Railroad, delivered lectures that attacked the Fugitive Slave Law, and in opposition to the popular opinion of the time, supported radical abolitionist militia leader John Brown and his party.[1] Two weeks after the ill-fated raid on Harpers Ferry and in the weeks leading up to Brown's execution, Thoreau delivered a speech to the citizens of Concord, Massachusetts, in which he compared the American government to Pontius Pilate and likened Brown's execution to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ:

Some eighteen hundred years ago Christ was crucified; this morning, perchance, Captain Brown was hung. These are the two ends of a chain which is not without its links. He is not Old Brown any longer; he is an angel of light.[5]

In The Last Days of John Brown, Thoreau described the words and deeds of John Brown as noble and an example of heroism.[99] In addition, he lamented the newspaper editors who dismissed Brown and his scheme as "crazy".[99]

Thoreau was a proponent of limited government and individualism. Although he was hopeful that mankind could potentially have, through self-betterment, the kind of government which "governs not at all", he distanced himself from contemporary "no-government men" (anarchists), writing: "I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government."[9]

Thoreau deemed the evolution from absolute monarchy to limited monarchy to democracy as "a progress toward true respect for the individual" and theorized about further improvements "towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man".[9] Echoing this belief, he went on to write: "There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly."[9]

It is on this basis that Thoreau could so strongly inveigh against the British administration and Catholicism in A Yankee in Canada. Despotic authority, Thoreau argued, had crushed the people's sense of ingenuity and enterprise; the Canadian habitants had been reduced, in his view, to a perpetual childlike state. Ignoring the recent rebellions, he argued that there would be no revolution in the St. Lawrence River valley.[64][100]

Although Thoreau believed resistance to unjustly exercised authority could be both violent (exemplified in his support for John Brown) and nonviolent (his own example of tax resistance displayed in Resistance to Civil Government), he regarded pacifist nonresistance as temptation to passivity,[101] writing: "Let not our Peace be proclaimed by the rust on our swords, or our inability to draw them from their scabbards; but let her at least have so much work on her hands as to keep those swords bright and sharp."[101] Furthermore, in a formal lyceum debate in 1841, he debated the subject "Is it ever proper to offer forcible resistance?", arguing the affirmative.[102]

Likewise, his condemnation of the Mexican–American War did not stem from pacifism, but rather because he considered Mexico "unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army" as a means to expand the slave territory.[103]

Thoreau was ambivalent towards industrialization and capitalism. On one hand he regarded commerce as "unexpectedly confident and serene, adventurous, and unwearied"[5] and expressed admiration for its associated cosmopolitanism, writing:

I am refreshed and expanded when the freight train rattles past me, and I smell the stores which go dispensing their odors all the way from Long Wharf to Lake Champlain, reminding me of foreign parts, of coral reefs, and Indian oceans, and tropical climes, and the extent of the globe. I feel more like a citizen of the world at the sight of the palm-leaf which will cover so many flaxen New England heads the next summer.[5]

On the other hand, he wrote disparagingly of the factory system:

I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men may get clothing. The condition of the operatives is becoming every day more like that of the English; and it cannot be wondered at, since, as far as I have heard or observed, the principal object is, not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that the corporations may be enriched.[5]

Thoreau also favored the protection of animals and wild areas, free trade, and taxation for schools and highways,[1] and espoused views that at least in part align with what is today known as bioregionalism. He disapproved of the subjugation of Native Americans, slavery, philistinism, technological utopianism, and what can be regarded in today's terms as consumerism, mass entertainment, and frivolous applications of technology.[1]

Intellectual interests, influences, and affinities

Indian sacred texts and philosophy

Thoreau was influenced by Indian spiritual thought. In Walden, there are many overt references to the sacred texts of India. For example, in the first chapter ("Economy"), he writes: "How much more admirable the Bhagvat-Geeta than all the ruins of the East!"[5] American Philosophy: An Encyclopedia classes him as one of several figures who "took a more pantheist or pandeist approach by rejecting views of God as separate from the world",[104] also a characteristic of Hinduism.

Furthermore, in "The Pond in Winter", he equates Walden Pond with the sacred Ganges river, writing:

In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat 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.[5]

Thoreau was aware his Ganges imagery could have been factual. He wrote about ice harvesting at Walden Pond. And he knew that New England's ice merchants were shipping ice to foreign ports, including Calcutta.[105]

Additionally, Thoreau followed various Hindu customs, including a diet largely consisting of rice ("It was fit that I should live on rice, mainly, who loved so well the philosophy of India."[5]), flute playing (reminiscent of the favorite musical pastime of Krishna),[106] and yoga.[107]

In an 1849 letter to his friend H.G.O. Blake, he wrote about yoga and its meaning to him:

Free in this world as the birds in the air, disengaged from every kind of chains, those who practice yoga gather in Brahma the certain fruits of their works. Depend upon it that, rude and careless as I am, I would fain practice the yoga faithfully. The yogi, absorbed in contemplation, contributes in his degree to creation; he breathes a divine perfume, he hears wonderful things. Divine forms traverse him without tearing him, and united to the nature which is proper to him, he goes, he acts as animating original matter. To some extent, and at rare intervals, even I am a yogi.[108]

Biology

 
Bird eggs found by Thoreau and given to the Boston Society of Natural History. Those in the nest are of yellow warbler, the other two of red-tailed hawk.

Thoreau read contemporary works in the new science of biology, including the works of Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Darwin, and Asa Gray (Charles Darwin's staunchest American ally).[109] Thoreau was deeply influenced by Humboldt, especially his work Cosmos.[110]

In 1859, Thoreau purchased and read Darwin's On the Origin of Species. Unlike many natural historians at the time, including Louis Agassiz who publicly opposed Darwinism in favor of a static view of nature, Thoreau was immediately enthusiastic about the theory of evolution by natural selection and endorsed it,[111] stating:

The development theory implies a greater vital force in Nature, because it is more flexible and accommodating, and equivalent to a sort of constant new creation. (A quote from On the Origin of Species follows this sentence.)[109]

Influence

Thoreau's careful observations and devastating conclusions have rippled into time, becoming stronger as the weaknesses Thoreau noted have become more pronounced ... Events that seem to be completely unrelated to his stay at Walden Pond have been influenced by it, including the national park system, the British labor movement, the creation of India, the civil rights movement, the hippie revolution, the environmental movement, and the wilderness movement. Today, Thoreau's words are quoted with feeling by liberals, socialists, anarchists, libertarians, and conservatives alike.

— Ken Kifer, Analysis and Notes on Walden: Henry Thoreau's Text with Adjacent Thoreauvian Commentary[112]

Thoreau's political writings had little impact during his lifetime, as "his contemporaries did not see him as a theorist or as a radical", viewing him instead as a naturalist. They either dismissed or ignored his political essays, including Civil Disobedience. The only two complete books (as opposed to essays) published in his lifetime, Walden and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), both dealt with nature, in which he "loved to wander".[18] His obituary was lumped in with others rather than as a separate article in an 1862 yearbook.[113] Critics and the public continued either to disdain or to ignore Thoreau for years, but the publication of extracts from his journal in the 1880's by his friend H.G.O. Blake, and of a definitive set of Thoreau's works by the Riverside Press between 1893 and 1906, led to the rise of what literary historian F. L. Pattee called a "Thoreau cult."[114]

Thoreau's writings went on to influence many public figures. Political leaders and reformers like Mohandas Gandhi, U.S. President John F. Kennedy, American civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr., U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, and Russian author Leo Tolstoy all spoke of being strongly affected by Thoreau's work, particularly Civil Disobedience, as did "right-wing theorist Frank Chodorov [who] devoted an entire issue of his monthly, Analysis, to an appreciation of Thoreau".[115]

Thoreau also influenced many artists and authors including Edward Abbey, Willa Cather, Marcel Proust, William Butler Yeats, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Upton Sinclair,[116] E. B. White, Lewis Mumford,[117] Frank Lloyd Wright, Alexander Posey,[118] and Gustav Stickley.[119] Thoreau also influenced naturalists like John Burroughs, John Muir, E. O. Wilson, Edwin Way Teale, Joseph Wood Krutch, B. F. Skinner, David Brower, and Loren Eiseley, whom Publishers Weekly called "the modern Thoreau".[120]

Thoreau's friend William Ellery Channing published his first biography, Thoreau the Poet-Naturalist, in 1873.[121] English writer Henry Stephens Salt wrote a biography of Thoreau in 1890, which popularized Thoreau's ideas in Britain: George Bernard Shaw, Edward Carpenter, and Robert Blatchford were among those who became Thoreau enthusiasts as a result of Salt's advocacy.[122] Mohandas Gandhi first read Walden in 1906 while working as a civil rights activist in Johannesburg, South Africa. He first read Civil Disobedience "while he sat in a South African prison for the crime of nonviolently protesting discrimination against the Indian population in the Transvaal. The essay galvanized Gandhi, who wrote and published a synopsis of Thoreau's argument, calling its 'incisive logic ... unanswerable' and referring to Thoreau as 'one of the greatest and most moral men America has produced'."[123][124] He told American reporter Webb Miller, "[Thoreau's] ideas influenced me greatly. I adopted some of them and recommended the study of Thoreau to all of my friends who were helping me in the cause of Indian Independence. Why I actually took the name of my movement from Thoreau's essay 'On the Duty of Civil Disobedience', written about 80 years ago."[125]

Martin Luther King Jr. noted in his autobiography that his first encounter with the idea of nonviolent resistance was reading "On Civil Disobedience" in 1944 while attending Morehouse College. He wrote in his autobiography that it was,

Here, in this courageous New Englander's refusal to pay his taxes and his choice of jail rather than support a war that would spread slavery's territory into Mexico, I made my first contact with the theory of nonviolent resistance. Fascinated by the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil system, I was so deeply moved that I reread the work several times. I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. No other person has been more eloquent and passionate in getting this idea across than Henry David Thoreau. As a result of his writings and personal witness, we are the heirs of a legacy of creative protest. The teachings of Thoreau came alive in our civil rights movement; indeed, they are more alive than ever before. Whether expressed in a sit-in at lunch counters, a freedom ride into Mississippi, a peaceful protest in Albany, Georgia, a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, these are outgrowths of Thoreau's insistence that evil must be resisted and that no moral man can patiently adjust to injustice.[126]

American psychologist B. F. Skinner wrote that he carried a copy of Thoreau's Walden with him in his youth.[127] In 1945 he wrote Walden Two, a fictional utopia about 1,000 members of a community living together inspired by the life of Thoreau.[128] Thoreau and his fellow Transcendentalists from Concord were a major inspiration of the composer Charles Ives. The 4th movement of the Concord Sonata for piano (with a part for flute, Thoreau's instrument) is a character picture, and he also set Thoreau's words.[129]

Actor Ron Thompson did a dramatic portrayal of Henry David Thoreau on the 1976 NBC television series The Rebels.[130][131][132]

Thoreau's ideas have impacted and resonated with various strains in the anarchist movement, with Emma Goldman referring to him as "the greatest American anarchist".[133] Green anarchism and anarcho-primitivism in particular have both derived inspiration and ecological points-of-view from the writings of Thoreau. John Zerzan included Thoreau's text "Excursions" (1863) in his edited compilation of works in the anarcho-primitivist tradition titled Against civilization: Readings and reflections.[134] Additionally, Murray Rothbard, the founder of anarcho-capitalism, has opined that Thoreau was one of the "great intellectual heroes" of his movement.[115] Thoreau was also an important influence on late-19th-century anarchist naturism.[135][136] Globally, Thoreau's concepts also held importance within individualist anarchist circles[137][138] in Spain,[135][136][137] France,[137][139] and Portugal.[140]

For the 200th anniversary of his birth, publishers released several new editions of his work: a recreation of Walden's 1902 edition with illustrations, a picture book with excerpts from Walden, and an annotated collection of Thoreau's essays on slavery.[141] The United States Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp honoring Thoreau on May 23, 2017, in Concord, MA.[142]

Criticism

Thoreau's work and career received little attention until 1865, when the North American Review published James Russell Lowell's review of various papers of Thoreau's that Emerson had collected and edited.[143] Lowell's essay, Letters to Various Persons,[144] which Lowell republished as a chapter in his My Study Windows,[145] derided Thoreau as a humorless poseur trafficking in commonplaces, a sentimentalist lacking in imagination, a "Diogenes in his barrel," resentfully criticizing what he could not attain.[146] Lowell's caustic analysis influenced Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson,[147] who criticized Thoreau as a "skulker," saying "He did not wish virtue to go out of him among his fellow-men, but slunk into a corner to hoard it for himself."[148]

Nathaniel Hawthorne had mixed feelings about Thoreau. He noted that "He is a keen and delicate observer of nature—a genuine observer—which, I suspect, is almost as rare a character as even an original poet; and Nature, in return for his love, seems to adopt him as her especial child, and shows him secrets which few others are allowed to witness."[149] On the other hand, he also wrote that Thoreau "repudiated all regular modes of getting a living, and seems inclined to lead a sort of Indian life among civilized men".[150][151]

In a similar vein, poet John Greenleaf Whittier detested what he deemed to be the "wicked" and "heathenish" message of Walden, claiming that Thoreau wanted man to "lower himself to the level of a woodchuck and walk on four legs".[152]

In response to such criticisms, English novelist George Eliot, writing for the Westminster Review, characterized such critics as uninspired and narrow-minded:

People—very wise in their own eyes—who would have every man's life ordered according to a particular pattern, and who are intolerant of every existence the utility of which is not palpable to them, may pooh-pooh Mr. Thoreau and this episode in his history, as unpractical and dreamy.[153]

Thoreau himself also responded to the criticism in a paragraph of his work Walden by illustrating the irrelevance of their inquiries:

I should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice of my readers if very particular inquiries had not been made by my townsmen concerning my mode of life, which some would call impertinent, though they do not appear to me at all impertinent, but, considering the circumstances, very natural and pertinent. Some have asked what I got to eat; if I did not feel lonesome; if I was not afraid; and the like. Others have been curious to learn what portion of my income I devoted to charitable purposes; and some, who have large families, how many poor children I maintained. ... Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives; ... I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits.[154]

Recent criticism has accused Thoreau of hypocrisy, misanthropy, and being sanctimonious, based on his writings in Walden,[155] although this criticism has been perceived as highly selective.[156][157][158]

Selected works

Many of Thoreau's works were not published during his lifetime, including his journals and numerous unfinished manuscripts.

See also

References

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Further reading

  • Balthrop‐Lewis, Alda. "Exemplarist Environmental Ethics: Thoreau's Political Ascetism against Solution Thinking." Journal of Religious Ethics 47.3 (2019): 525–550.
  • Bode, Carl. Best of Thoreau's Journals. Southern Illinois University Press. 1967.
  • Botkin, Daniel. No Man's Garden
  • Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Harvard UP, 1995)
  • Cafaro, Philip. Thoreau's Living Ethics: "Walden" and the Pursuit of Virtue (U of Georgia Press, 2004)
  • Chodorov, Frank. The Disarming Honesty of Henry David Thoreau September 14, 2014, at the Wayback Machine
  • Conrad, Randall. Who He Was & Why He Matters October 12, 2006, at the Wayback Machine
  • Cramer, Jeffrey S. Solid Seasons: The Friendship of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson (Counterpoint Press, 2019).
  • Dean, Bradley P. ed., Letters to a Spiritual Seeker. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004.
  • Finley, James S., ed. Henry David Thoreau in Context (Cambridge UP, 2017).
  • Furtak, Rick, Ellsworth, Jonathan, and Reid, James D., eds. Thoreau's Importance for Philosophy. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012.
  • Gionfriddo, Michael. "Thoreau, the Work of Breathing, and Building Castles in the Air: Reading Walden's 'Conclusion'." The Concord Saunterer 25 (2017): 49-90 online April 17, 2021, at the Wayback Machine.
  • Guhr, Sebastian. Mr. Lincoln & Mr. Thoreau. S. Marix Verlag, Wiesbaden 2021.
  • Harding, Walter. The Days of Henry Thoreau. Princeton University Press, 1982.
  • Hendrick, George. "The Influence of Thoreau's 'Civil Disobedience' on Gandhi's Satyagraha." The New England Quarterly 29, no. 4 (December 1956). 462–471.
  • Hess, Scott (2019). "Walden Pond as Thoreau's Landscape of Genius". Nineteenth-Century Literature. 74 (2): 224–250. doi:10.1525/ncl.2019.74.2.224. ISSN 0891-9356. S2CID 204481348.
  • Howarth, William. The Book of Concord: Thoreau's Life as a Writer. Viking Press, 1982
  • Judd, Richard W. Finding Thoreau: The Meaning of Nature in the Making of an Environmental Icon (2018) excerpt July 23, 2021, at the Wayback Machine
  • McGregor, Robert Kuhn. A Wider View of the Universe: Henry Thoreau's Study of Nature (U of Illinois Press, 1997).
  • Marble, Annie Russell. Thoreau: His Home, Friends and Books. New York: AMS Press. 1969 [1902]
  • Myerson, Joel et al. The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau. Cambridge University Press. 1995
  • Nash, Roderick. Henry David Thoreau, Philosopher
  • Paolucci, Stefano. "The Foundations of Thoreau's 'Castles in the Air'" August 27, 2021, at the Wayback Machine, Thoreau Society Bulletin, No. 290 (Summer 2015), 10. (See also the Full Unedited Version of the same article.)
  • Parrington, Vernon. Main Current in American Thought September 1, 2006, at the Wayback Machine. V 2 online. 1927
  • Parrington, Vernon L. Henry Thoreau: Transcendental Economist June 12, 2007, at the Wayback Machine
  • Petroski, Henry. "H. D. Thoreau, Engineer." American Heritage of Invention and Technology, Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 8–16
  • Petrulionis, Sandra Harbert, ed., Thoreau in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn From Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012. ISBN 1-60938-087-8
  • Richardson, Robert D. Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles. 1986. ISBN 0-520-06346-5
  • Riggenbach, Jeff (2008). "Thoreau, Henry David (1817–1862)". In Hamowy, Ronald (ed.). The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage; Cato Institute. pp. 506–507. doi:10.4135/9781412965811.n309. ISBN 978-1412965804. LCCN 2008009151. OCLC 750831024. from the original on September 30, 2020. Retrieved June 20, 2015.
  • Riggenbach, Jeff (July 15, 2010). "Henry David Thoreau: Founding Father of American Libertarian Thought". Mises Daily. from the original on September 14, 2014. Retrieved September 13, 2014.
  • Ridl, Jack. "Moose. Indian. August 27, 2021, at the Wayback Machine" Scintilla (poem on Thoreau's last words)
  • Schneider, Richard Civilizing Thoreau: Human Ecology and the Emerging Social Sciences in the Major Works Rochester, New York. Camden House. 2016. ISBN 978-1-57113-960-3
  • Smith, David C. "The Transcendental Saunterer: Thoreau and the Search for Self." Savannah, Georgia: Frederic C. Beil, 1997. ISBN 0-913720-74-7
  • Sullivan, Mark W. "Henry David Thoreau in the American Art of the 1950s." The Concord Saunterer: A Journal of Thoreau Studies, New Series, Vol. 18 (2010), pp. 68–89.
  • Sullivan, Mark W. Picturing Thoreau: Henry David Thoreau in American Visual Culture. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2015
  • Tauber, Alfred I. Henry David Thoreau and the Moral Agency of Knowing. University of California, Berkeley. 2001. ISBN 0-520-23915-6
  • Henry David Thoreau March 4, 2016, at the Wayback Machine – Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  • Henry David Thoreau December 4, 2010, at the Wayback Machine – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
  • Thorson, Robert M. The Boatman: Henry David Thoreau's River Years (Harvard UP, 2017), on his scientific study of the Concord River in the late 1850s.
  • Thorson, Robert M. Walden's Shore: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Science (2015).
  • Thorson, Robert M. The Guide to Walden Pond: An Exploration of the History, Nature, Landscape, and Literature of One of America's Most Iconic Places (2018).
  • Traub, Courtney (2015). "'First-Rate Fellows': Excavating Thoreau's Radical Egalitarian Reflections in a Late Draft of "Allegash"". The Concord Saunterer: A Journal of Thoreau Studies. 23: 74–96.
  • Walls, Laura Dassow. Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and 19th Century Science. University of Wisconsin. 1995. ISBN 0-299-14744-4
  • Walls, Laura Dassow. Henry David Thoreau: A Life. The University of Chicago Press. 2017. ISBN 978-0-226-34469-0
  • Ward, John William. 1969 Red, White, and Blue: Men, Books, and Ideas in American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press

External links

 
Wikisource has original works by or about:
Henry David Thoreau
 
Wikiquote has quotations related to Henry David Thoreau.
 
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Henry David Thoreau.
 
Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article "Thoreau, Henry David".

Texts

  • Works by Henry David Thoreau in eBook form at Standard Ebooks
  • Works by Henry David Thoreau at Project Gutenberg
  • Works by Henry D. Thoreau at Faded Page (Canada)
  • Works by or about Henry David Thoreau at Internet Archive
  • Works by Henry David Thoreau at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)  
  • Works by Thoreau at Open Library
  • Poems by Thoreau October 19, 2017, at the Wayback Machine at the Academy of American Poets
  • The Thoreau Reader April 5, 2006, at the Wayback Machine by The Thoreau Society
  • The Writings of Henry David Thoreau at The Walden Woods Project
  • Scans of Thoreau's Land Surveys at the Concord Free Public Library
  • Henry David Thoreau Online – The Works and Life of Henry D. Thoreau

February 05, 2023
henry, david, thoreau, thoreau, redirects, here, other, uses, thoreau, disambiguation, july, 1817, 1862, american, naturalist, essayist, poet, philosopher, leading, transcendentalist, best, known, book, walden, reflection, upon, simple, living, natural, surrou. Thoreau redirects here For other uses see Thoreau disambiguation Henry David Thoreau July 12 1817 May 6 1862 was an American naturalist essayist poet and philosopher 3 A leading transcendentalist 4 he is best known for his book Walden a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings and his essay Civil Disobedience originally published as Resistance to Civil Government an argument for disobedience to an unjust state Henry David ThoreauThoreau in 1856BornDavid Henry Thoreau 1817 07 12 July 12 1817Concord Massachusetts U S DiedMay 6 1862 1862 05 06 aged 44 Concord Massachusetts U S Alma materHarvard CollegeEra19th century philosophyRegionWestern philosophySchoolTranscendentalism 1 Main interestsEthicspoetryreligionpoliticsbiologyphilosophyhistoryNotable ideasAbolitionismtax resistancedevelopment criticismcivil disobedienceconscientious objectiondirect actionenvironmentalismanarchismsimple livingInfluences Indian philosophyAristotleHomerAeschylusPindarCato the ElderEtienne de La BoetieRalph Waldo EmersonThomas CarlyleCharles DarwinAlexander von Humboldt 2 Influenced Mahatma GandhiJohn F KennedyMartin Luther King Jr Walt WhitmanLeo TolstoyMarcel ProustW B YeatsSinclair LewisErnest HemingwayUpton SinclairEmma GoldmanE B WhiteE O WilsonChristopher McCandlessB F SkinnerGeorge Bernard ShawJohn ZerzanJohn MuirGlenn GouldStanley CavellJohn CageJonas MekasSignatureThoreau s books articles essays journals and poetry amount to more than 20 volumes Among his lasting contributions are his writings on natural history and philosophy in which he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history two sources of modern day environmentalism His literary style interweaves close observation of nature personal experience pointed rhetoric symbolic meanings and historical lore while displaying a poetic sensibility philosophical austerity and attention to practical detail 5 He was also deeply interested in the idea of survival in the face of hostile elements historical change and natural decay at the same time he advocated abandoning waste and illusion in order to discover life s true essential needs 5 Thoreau was a lifelong abolitionist delivering lectures that attacked the fugitive slave law while praising the writings of Wendell Phillips and defending the abolitionist John Brown Thoreau s philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced the political thoughts and actions of such notable figures as Leo Tolstoy Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr 6 Thoreau is sometimes referred to as an anarchist 7 8 In Civil Disobedience Thoreau wrote I heartily accept the motto That government is best which governs least and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically Carried out it finally amounts to this which also I believe That government is best which governs not at all and when men are prepared for it that will be the kind of government which they will have But to speak practically and as a cit i zen unlike those who call themselves no gov ernment men I ask for not at once no gov ernment but at once a better government 9 Contents 1 Pronunciation of his name 2 Physical appearance 3 Life 3 1 Early life and education 1817 1837 3 2 Return to Concord 1837 1844 3 3 Civil Disobedience and the Walden years 1845 1850 3 4 Later years 1851 1862 3 5 Death 3 6 Nature and human existence 3 7 Sexuality 3 8 Politics 3 9 Intellectual interests influences and affinities 3 9 1 Indian sacred texts and philosophy 3 9 2 Biology 4 Influence 5 Criticism 6 Selected works 7 See also 8 References 9 Further reading 10 External links 10 1 TextsPronunciation of his name EditAmos Bronson Alcott and Thoreau s aunt each wrote that Thoreau is pronounced like the word thorough ˈ 8 ʌr oʊ THURR oh in General American 10 11 but more precisely ˈ 8 ɔːr oʊ THOR oh in 19th century New England Edward Waldo Emerson wrote that the name should be pronounced Tho row with the h sounded and stress on the first syllable 12 Among modern day American English speakers it is perhaps more commonly pronounced 8 e ˈ r oʊ the ROH with stress on the second syllable 13 14 Physical appearance EditThoreau had a distinctive appearance with a nose that he called his most prominent feature 15 Of his appearance and disposition Ellery Channing wrote 16 His face once seen could not be forgotten The features were quite marked the nose aquiline or very Roman like one of the portraits of Caesar more like a beak as was said large overhanging brows above the deepest set blue eyes that could be seen in certain lights and in others gray eyes expressive of all shades of feeling but never weak or near sighted the forehead not unusually broad or high full of concentrated energy and purpose the mouth with prominent lips pursed up with meaning and thought when silent and giving out when open with the most varied and unusual instructive sayings Life EditEarly life and education 1817 1837 Edit Thoreau s birthplace the Wheeler Minot Farmhouse in Concord Massachusetts Henry David Thoreau was born David Henry Thoreau 17 in Concord Massachusetts into the modest New England family 18 of John Thoreau a pencil maker and Cynthia Dunbar His father was of French Protestant descent 19 His paternal grandfather had been born on the UK crown dependency island of Jersey 20 His maternal grandfather Asa Dunbar led Harvard s 1766 student Butter Rebellion 21 the first recorded student protest in the American colonies 22 David Henry was named after his recently deceased paternal uncle David Thoreau He began to call himself Henry David after he finished college he never petitioned to make a legal name change 23 He had two older siblings Helen and John Jr and a younger sister Sophia Thoreau 24 None of the children married 25 Helen 1812 1849 died at age 37 25 from tuberculosis John Jr 1814 1842 died at age 27 26 of tetanus after cutting himself while shaving 27 Henry David 1817 1862 died at age 44 of tuberculosis 28 Sophia 1819 1876 survived him by 14 years dying at age 56 25 of tuberculosis 29 He studied at Harvard College between 1833 and 1837 He lived in Hollis Hall 30 and took courses in rhetoric classics philosophy mathematics and science 31 He was a member of the Institute of 1770 32 now the Hasty Pudding Club According to legend Thoreau refused to pay the five dollar fee approximately equivalent to 136 in 2021 for a Harvard master s diploma which he described thus Harvard College offered it to graduates who proved their physical worth by being alive three years after graduating and their saving earning or inheriting quality or condition by having Five Dollars to give the college 33 He commented Let every sheep keep its own skin 34 a reference to the tradition of using sheepskin vellum for diplomas Thoreau s birthplace still exists on Virginia Road in Concord The house has been restored by the Thoreau Farm Trust 35 a nonprofit organization and is now open to the public Return to Concord 1837 1844 Edit The traditional professions open to college graduates law the church business medicine did not interest Thoreau 36 25 so in 1835 he took a leave of absence from Harvard during which he taught at a school in Canton Massachusetts living for two years at an earlier version of today s Colonial Inn in Concord His grandfather owned the earliest of the three buildings that were later combined 37 After he graduated in 1837 Thoreau joined the faculty of the Concord public school but he resigned after a few weeks rather than administer corporal punishment 36 25 He and his brother John then opened the Concord Academy a grammar school in Concord in 1838 36 25 They introduced several progressive concepts including nature walks and visits to local shops and businesses The school closed when John became fatally ill from tetanus in 1842 after cutting himself while shaving 38 39 He died in Henry s arms 40 Upon graduation Thoreau returned home to Concord where he met Ralph Waldo Emerson through a mutual friend 18 Emerson who was 14 years his senior took a paternal and at times patron like interest in Thoreau advising the young man and introducing him to a circle of local writers and thinkers including Ellery Channing Margaret Fuller Bronson Alcott and Nathaniel Hawthorne and his son Julian Hawthorne who was a boy at the time Emerson urged Thoreau to contribute essays and poems to a quarterly periodical The Dial and lobbied the editor Margaret Fuller to publish those writings Thoreau s first essay published in The Dial was Aulus Persius Flaccus 41 an essay on the Roman poet and satirist in July 1840 42 It consisted of revised passages from his journal which he had begun keeping at Emerson s suggestion The first journal entry on October 22 1837 reads What are you doing now he asked Do you keep a journal So I make my first entry to day 43 Thoreau was a philosopher of nature and its relation to the human condition In his early years he followed transcendentalism a loose and eclectic idealist philosophy advocated by Emerson Fuller and Alcott They held that an ideal spiritual state transcends or goes beyond the physical and empirical and that one achieves that insight via personal intuition rather than religious doctrine In their view Nature is the outward sign of inward spirit expressing the radical correspondence of visible things and human thoughts as Emerson wrote in Nature 1836 1967 U S postage stamp honoring Thoreau designed by Leonard Baskin On April 18 1841 Thoreau moved in with the Emersons 44 There from 1841 to 1844 he served as the children s tutor he was also an editorial assistant repairman and gardener For a few months in 1843 he moved to the home of William Emerson on Staten Island 45 and tutored the family s sons while seeking contacts among literary men and journalists in the city who might help publish his writings including his future literary representative Horace Greeley 46 68 Thoreau returned to Concord and worked in his family s pencil factory which he would continue to do alongside his writing and other work for most of his adult life He resurrected the process of making good pencils with inferior graphite by using clay as a binder 47 The process of mixing graphite and clay known as the Conte process had been first patented by Nicolas Jacques Conte in 1795 Thoreau made profitable use of a graphite source found in New Hampshire that had been purchased in 1821 by his uncle Charles Dunbar The company s other source of graphite had been Tantiusques a mine operated by Native Americans in Sturbridge Massachusetts Later Thoreau converted the pencil factory to produce plumbago a name for graphite at the time which was used in the electrotyping process 48 Once back in Concord Thoreau went through a restless period In April 1844 he and his friend Edward Hoar accidentally set a fire that consumed 300 acres 120 hectares of Walden Woods 49 Civil Disobedience and the Walden years 1845 1850 Edit Thoreau sites at Walden Pond I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately to front only the essential facts of life and see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not when I came to die discover that I had not lived I did not wish to live what was not life living is so dear nor did I wish to practise resignation unless it was quite necessary I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life to live so sturdily and Spartan like as to put to rout all that was not life to cut a broad swath and shave close to drive life into a corner and reduce it to its lowest terms and if it proved to be mean why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it and publish its meanness to the world or if it were sublime to know it by experience and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion Henry David Thoreau Where I Lived and What I Lived For in Walden 50 Thoreau felt a need to concentrate and work more on his writing In 1845 Ellery Channing told Thoreau Go out upon that build yourself a hut amp there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive I see no other alternative no other hope for you 51 Thus on July 4 1845 Thoreau embarked on a two year experiment in simple living moving to a small house he had built on land owned by Emerson in a second growth forest around the shores of Walden Pond The house was in a pretty pasture and woodlot of 14 acres 5 7 hectares that Emerson had bought 52 1 1 2 miles 2 5 kilometers from his family home 53 Whilst there he wrote his only extended piece of literary criticism Thomas Carlyle and His Works 54 Original title page of Walden with an illustration from a drawing by Thoreau s sister Sophia On July 24 or July 25 1846 Thoreau ran into the local tax collector Sam Staples who asked him to pay six years of delinquent poll taxes Thoreau refused because of his opposition to the Mexican American War and slavery and he spent a night in jail because of this refusal The next day Thoreau was freed when someone likely to have been his aunt paid the tax against his wishes 6 The experience had a strong impact on Thoreau In January and February 1848 he delivered lectures on The Rights and Duties of the Individual in relation to Government 55 explaining his tax resistance at the Concord Lyceum Bronson Alcott attended the lecture writing in his journal on January 26 Heard Thoreau s lecture before the Lyceum on the relation of the individual to the State an admirable statement of the rights of the individual to self government and an attentive audience His allusions to the Mexican War to Mr Hoar s expulsion from Carolina his own imprisonment in Concord Jail for refusal to pay his tax Mr Hoar s payment of mine when taken to prison for a similar refusal were all pertinent well considered and reasoned I took great pleasure in this deed of Thoreau s Bronson Alcott Journals 56 Thoreau revised the lecture into an essay titled Resistance to Civil Government also known as Civil Disobedience It was published by Elizabeth Peabody in the Aesthetic Papers in May 1849 Thoreau had taken up a version of Percy Shelley s principle in the political poem The Mask of Anarchy 1819 which begins with the powerful images of the unjust forms of authority of his time and then imagines the stirrings of a radically new form of social action 57 At Walden Pond Thoreau completed a first draft of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers an elegy to his brother John describing their trip to the White Mountains in 1839 Thoreau did not find a publisher for the book and instead printed 1 000 copies at his own expense fewer than 300 were sold 44 234 He self published on the advice of Emerson using Emerson s publisher Munroe who did little to publicize the book Reconstruction of the interior of Thoreau s cabin Replica of Thoreau s cabin and a statue of him near Walden Pond In August 1846 Thoreau briefly left Walden to make a trip to Mount Katahdin in Maine a journey later recorded in Ktaadn the first part of The Maine Woods Thoreau left Walden Pond on September 6 1847 44 244 At Emerson s request he immediately moved back to the Emerson house to help Emerson s wife Lidian manage the household while her husband was on an extended trip to Europe 58 Over several years as he worked to pay off his debts he continuously revised the manuscript of what he eventually published as Walden or Life in the Woods in 1854 recounting the two years two months and two days he had spent at Walden Pond The book compresses that time into a single calendar year using the passage of the four seasons to symbolize human development Part memoir and part spiritual quest Walden at first won few admirers but later critics have regarded it as a classic American work that explores natural simplicity harmony and beauty as models for just social and cultural conditions The American poet Robert Frost wrote of Thoreau In one book he surpasses everything we have had in America 59 The American author John Updike said of the book A century and a half after its publication Walden has become such a totem of the back to nature preservationist anti business civil disobedience mindset and Thoreau so vivid a protester so perfect a crank and hermit saint that the book risks being as revered and unread as the Bible 60 Thoreau moved out of Emerson s house in July 1848 and stayed at a house on nearby Belknap Street In 1850 he moved into a house at 255 Main Street where he lived until his death 61 In the summer of 1850 Thoreau and Channing journeyed from Boston to Montreal and Quebec City These would be Thoreau s only travels outside the United States 62 It is as a result of this trip that he developed lectures that eventually became A Yankee in Canada He jested that all he got from this adventure was a cold 63 In fact this proved an opportunity to contrast American civic spirit and democratic values with a colony apparently ruled by illegitimate religious and military power Whereas his own country had had its revolution in Canada history had failed to turn 64 Later years 1851 1862 Edit Thoreau in 1854 In 1851 Thoreau became increasingly fascinated with natural history and narratives of travel and expedition He read avidly on botany and often wrote observations on this topic into his journal He admired William Bartram and Charles Darwin s Voyage of the Beagle He kept detailed observations on Concord s nature lore recording everything from how the fruit ripened over time to the fluctuating depths of Walden Pond and the days certain birds migrated The point of this task was to anticipate the seasons of nature in his word 65 66 He became a land surveyor and continued to write increasingly detailed observations on the natural history of the town covering an area of 26 square miles 67 square kilometers in his journal a two million word document he kept for 24 years He also kept a series of notebooks and these observations became the source of his late writings on natural history such as Autumnal Tints The Succession of Trees and Wild Apples an essay lamenting the destruction of the local wild apple species With the rise of environmental history and ecocriticism as academic disciplines several new readings of Thoreau began to emerge showing him to have been both a philosopher and an analyst of ecological patterns in fields and woodlots 67 68 For instance The Succession of Forest Trees shows that he used experimentation and analysis to explain how forests regenerate after fire or human destruction through the dispersal of seeds by winds or animals In this lecture first presented to a cattle show in Concord and considered his greatest contribution to ecology Thoreau explained why one species of tree can grow in a place where a different tree did previously He observed that squirrels often carry nuts far from the tree from which they fell to create stashes These seeds are likely to germinate and grow should the squirrel die or abandon the stash He credited the squirrel for performing a great service in the economy of the universe 69 Walden Pond He traveled to Canada East once Cape Cod four times and Maine three times these landscapes inspired his excursion books A Yankee in Canada Cape Cod and The Maine Woods in which travel itineraries frame his thoughts about geography history and philosophy Other travels took him southwest to Philadelphia and New York City in 1854 and west across the Great Lakes region in 1861 when he visited Niagara Falls Detroit Chicago Milwaukee St Paul and Mackinac Island 70 He was provincial in his own travels but he read widely about travel in other lands He devoured all the first hand travel accounts available in his day at a time when the last unmapped regions of the earth were being explored He read Magellan and James Cook the arctic explorers John Franklin Alexander Mackenzie and William Parry David Livingstone and Richard Francis Burton on Africa Lewis and Clark and hundreds of lesser known works by explorers and literate travelers 71 Astonishing amounts of reading fed his endless curiosity about the peoples cultures religions and natural history of the world and left its traces as commentaries in his voluminous journals He processed everything he read in the local laboratory of his Concord experience Among his famous aphorisms is his advice to live at home like a traveler 72 After John Brown s raid on Harpers Ferry many prominent voices in the abolitionist movement distanced themselves from Brown or damned him with faint praise Thoreau was disgusted by this and he composed a key speech A Plea for Captain John Brown which was uncompromising in its defense of Brown and his actions Thoreau s speech proved persuasive the abolitionist movement began to accept Brown as a martyr and by the time of the American Civil War entire armies of the North were literally singing Brown s praises As a biographer of Brown put it If as Alfred Kazin suggests without John Brown there would have been no Civil War we would add that without the Concord Transcendentalists John Brown would have had little cultural impact 73 Thoreau in his second and final photographic sitting August 1861 Death Edit Thoreau contracted tuberculosis in 1835 and suffered from it sporadically afterwards In 1860 following a late night excursion to count the rings of tree stumps during a rainstorm he became ill with bronchitis 74 75 76 His health declined with brief periods of remission and he eventually became bedridden Recognizing the terminal nature of his disease Thoreau spent his last years revising and editing his unpublished works particularly The Maine Woods and Excursions and petitioning publishers to print revised editions of A Week and Walden He wrote letters and journal entries until he became too weak to continue His friends were alarmed at his diminished appearance and were fascinated by his tranquil acceptance of death When his aunt Louisa asked him in his last weeks if he had made his peace with God Thoreau responded I did not know we had ever quarreled 77 Grave of Thoreau at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord Geodetic Marker at Thoreau s gravesite Aware he was dying Thoreau s last words were Now comes good sailing followed by two lone words moose and Indian 78 He died on May 6 1862 at age 44 Amos Bronson Alcott planned the service and read selections from Thoreau s works and Channing presented a hymn 79 Emerson wrote the eulogy spoken at the funeral 80 Thoreau was buried in the Dunbar family plot his remains and those of members of his immediate family were eventually moved to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord Massachusetts Nature and human existence Edit Most of the luxuries and many of the so called comforts of life are not only not indispensable but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind Thoreau 81 Thoreau was an early advocate of recreational hiking and canoeing of conserving natural resources on private land and of preserving wilderness as public land He was himself a highly skilled canoeist Nathaniel Hawthorne after a ride with him noted that Mr Thoreau managed the boat so perfectly either with two paddles or with one that it seemed instinct with his own will and to require no physical effort to guide it 82 He was not a strict vegetarian though he said he preferred that diet 83 and advocated it as a means of self improvement He wrote in Walden The practical objection to animal food in my case was its uncleanness and besides when I had caught and cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish they seemed not to have fed me essentially It was insignificant and unnecessary and cost more than it came to A little bread or a few potatoes would have done as well with less trouble and filth 84 Thoreau s famous quotation near his cabin site at Walden Pond Thoreau neither rejected civilization nor fully embraced wilderness Instead he sought a middle ground the pastoral realm that integrates nature and culture His philosophy required that he be a didactic arbitrator between the wilderness he based so much on and the spreading mass of humanity in North America He decried the latter endlessly but felt that a teacher needs to be close to those who needed to hear what he wanted to tell them The wildness he enjoyed was the nearby swamp or forest and he preferred partially cultivated country His idea of being far in the recesses of the wilderness of Maine was to travel the logger s path and the Indian trail but he also hiked on pristine land In the essay Henry David Thoreau Philosopher Roderick Nash wrote Thoreau left Concord in 1846 for the first of three trips to northern Maine His expectations were high because he hoped to find genuine primeval America But contact with real wilderness in Maine affected him far differently than had the idea of wilderness in Concord Instead of coming out of the woods with a deepened appreciation of the wilds Thoreau felt a greater respect for civilization and realized the necessity of balance 85 Of alcohol Thoreau wrote I would fain keep sober always I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man wine is not so noble a liquor Of all ebriosity who does not prefer to be intoxicated by the air he breathes 84 Sexuality Edit Thoreau never married and was childless In 1840 when he was 23 he proposed to eighteen year old Ellen Sewall but she refused him on the advice of her father 86 Thoreau s sexuality has long been the subject of speculation including by his contemporaries Critics have called him heterosexual homosexual or asexual 87 88 There is no evidence to suggest he had physical relations with anyone man or woman Some scholars have suggested that homoerotic sentiments run through his writings and concluded that he was homosexual 87 89 90 The elegy Sympathy was inspired by the eleven year old Edmund Sewall who had just spent five days in the Thoreau household in 1839 91 One scholar has suggested that he wrote the poem to Edmund because he could not bring himself to write it to Edmund s sister Anna 92 and another that Thoreau s emotional experiences with women are memorialized under a camouflage of masculine pronouns 93 but other scholars dismiss this 87 94 It has been argued that the long paean in Walden to the French Canadian woodchopper Alek Therien which includes allusions to Achilles and Patroclus is an expression of conflicted desire 95 In some of Thoreau s writing there is the sense of a secret self 96 In 1840 he writes in his journal My friend is the apology for my life In him are the spaces which my orbit traverses 97 Thoreau was strongly influenced by the moral reformers of his time and this may have instilled anxiety and guilt over sexual desire 98 Politics Edit John Brown Treason Broadside 1859 Thoreau was fervently against slavery and actively supported the abolitionist movement 1 He participated as a conductor in the Underground Railroad delivered lectures that attacked the Fugitive Slave Law and in opposition to the popular opinion of the time supported radical abolitionist militia leader John Brown and his party 1 Two weeks after the ill fated raid on Harpers Ferry and in the weeks leading up to Brown s execution Thoreau delivered a speech to the citizens of Concord Massachusetts in which he compared the American government to Pontius Pilate and likened Brown s execution to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ Some eighteen hundred years ago Christ was crucified this morning perchance Captain Brown was hung These are the two ends of a chain which is not without its links He is not Old Brown any longer he is an angel of light 5 In The Last Days of John Brown Thoreau described the words and deeds of John Brown as noble and an example of heroism 99 In addition he lamented the newspaper editors who dismissed Brown and his scheme as crazy 99 Thoreau was a proponent of limited government and individualism Although he was hopeful that mankind could potentially have through self betterment the kind of government which governs not at all he distanced himself from contemporary no government men anarchists writing I ask for not at once no government but at once a better government 9 Thoreau deemed the evolution from absolute monarchy to limited monarchy to democracy as a progress toward true respect for the individual and theorized about further improvements towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man 9 Echoing this belief he went on to write There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power from which all its power and authority are derived and treats him accordingly 9 It is on this basis that Thoreau could so strongly inveigh against the British administration and Catholicism in A Yankee in Canada Despotic authority Thoreau argued had crushed the people s sense of ingenuity and enterprise the Canadian habitants had been reduced in his view to a perpetual childlike state Ignoring the recent rebellions he argued that there would be no revolution in the St Lawrence River valley 64 100 Although Thoreau believed resistance to unjustly exercised authority could be both violent exemplified in his support for John Brown and nonviolent his own example of tax resistance displayed in Resistance to Civil Government he regarded pacifist nonresistance as temptation to passivity 101 writing Let not our Peace be proclaimed by the rust on our swords or our inability to draw them from their scabbards but let her at least have so much work on her hands as to keep those swords bright and sharp 101 Furthermore in a formal lyceum debate in 1841 he debated the subject Is it ever proper to offer forcible resistance arguing the affirmative 102 Likewise his condemnation of the Mexican American War did not stem from pacifism but rather because he considered Mexico unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army as a means to expand the slave territory 103 Thoreau was ambivalent towards industrialization and capitalism On one hand he regarded commerce as unexpectedly confident and serene adventurous and unwearied 5 and expressed admiration for its associated cosmopolitanism writing I am refreshed and expanded when the freight train rattles past me and I smell the stores which go dispensing their odors all the way from Long Wharf to Lake Champlain reminding me of foreign parts of coral reefs and Indian oceans and tropical climes and the extent of the globe I feel more like a citizen of the world at the sight of the palm leaf which will cover so many flaxen New England heads the next summer 5 On the other hand he wrote disparagingly of the factory system I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men may get clothing The condition of the operatives is becoming every day more like that of the English and it cannot be wondered at since as far as I have heard or observed the principal object is not that mankind may be well and honestly clad but unquestionably that the corporations may be enriched 5 Thoreau also favored the protection of animals and wild areas free trade and taxation for schools and highways 1 and espoused views that at least in part align with what is today known as bioregionalism He disapproved of the subjugation of Native Americans slavery philistinism technological utopianism and what can be regarded in today s terms as consumerism mass entertainment and frivolous applications of technology 1 Intellectual interests influences and affinities Edit Indian sacred texts and philosophy Edit Thoreau was influenced by Indian spiritual thought In Walden there are many overt references to the sacred texts of India For example in the first chapter Economy he writes How much more admirable the Bhagvat Geeta than all the ruins of the East 5 American Philosophy An Encyclopedia classes him as one of several figures who took a more pantheist or pandeist approach by rejecting views of God as separate from the world 104 also a characteristic of Hinduism Furthermore in The Pond in Winter he equates Walden Pond with the sacred Ganges river writing In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat 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 5 Thoreau was aware his Ganges imagery could have been factual He wrote about ice harvesting at Walden Pond And he knew that New England s ice merchants were shipping ice to foreign ports including Calcutta 105 Additionally Thoreau followed various Hindu customs including a diet largely consisting of rice It was fit that I should live on rice mainly who loved so well the philosophy of India 5 flute playing reminiscent of the favorite musical pastime of Krishna 106 and yoga 107 In an 1849 letter to his friend H G O Blake he wrote about yoga and its meaning to him Free in this world as the birds in the air disengaged from every kind of chains those who practice yoga gather in Brahma the certain fruits of their works Depend upon it that rude and careless as I am I would fain practice the yoga faithfully The yogi absorbed in contemplation contributes in his degree to creation he breathes a divine perfume he hears wonderful things Divine forms traverse him without tearing him and united to the nature which is proper to him he goes he acts as animating original matter To some extent and at rare intervals even I am a yogi 108 Biology Edit Bird eggs found by Thoreau and given to the Boston Society of Natural History Those in the nest are of yellow warbler the other two of red tailed hawk Thoreau read contemporary works in the new science of biology including the works of Alexander von Humboldt Charles Darwin and Asa Gray Charles Darwin s staunchest American ally 109 Thoreau was deeply influenced by Humboldt especially his work Cosmos 110 In 1859 Thoreau purchased and read Darwin s On the Origin of Species Unlike many natural historians at the time including Louis Agassiz who publicly opposed Darwinism in favor of a static view of nature Thoreau was immediately enthusiastic about the theory of evolution by natural selection and endorsed it 111 stating The development theory implies a greater vital force in Nature because it is more flexible and accommodating and equivalent to a sort of constant new creation A quote from On the Origin of Species follows this sentence 109 Influence Edit A bust of Thoreau from the Hall of Fame for Great Americans at the Bronx Community College Thoreau s careful observations and devastating conclusions have rippled into time becoming stronger as the weaknesses Thoreau noted have become more pronounced Events that seem to be completely unrelated to his stay at Walden Pond have been influenced by it including the national park system the British labor movement the creation of India the civil rights movement the hippie revolution the environmental movement and the wilderness movement Today Thoreau s words are quoted with feeling by liberals socialists anarchists libertarians and conservatives alike Ken Kifer Analysis and Notes on Walden Henry Thoreau s Text with Adjacent Thoreauvian Commentary 112 Thoreau s political writings had little impact during his lifetime as his contemporaries did not see him as a theorist or as a radical viewing him instead as a naturalist They either dismissed or ignored his political essays including Civil Disobedience The only two complete books as opposed to essays published in his lifetime Walden and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers 1849 both dealt with nature in which he loved to wander 18 His obituary was lumped in with others rather than as a separate article in an 1862 yearbook 113 Critics and the public continued either to disdain or to ignore Thoreau for years but the publication of extracts from his journal in the 1880 s by his friend H G O Blake and of a definitive set of Thoreau s works by the Riverside Press between 1893 and 1906 led to the rise of what literary historian F L Pattee called a Thoreau cult 114 Thoreau s writings went on to influence many public figures Political leaders and reformers like Mohandas Gandhi U S President John F Kennedy American civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr U S Supreme Court Justice William O Douglas and Russian author Leo Tolstoy all spoke of being strongly affected by Thoreau s work particularly Civil Disobedience as did right wing theorist Frank Chodorov who devoted an entire issue of his monthly Analysis to an appreciation of Thoreau 115 Thoreau also influenced many artists and authors including Edward Abbey Willa Cather Marcel Proust William Butler Yeats Sinclair Lewis Ernest Hemingway Upton Sinclair 116 E B White Lewis Mumford 117 Frank Lloyd Wright Alexander Posey 118 and Gustav Stickley 119 Thoreau also influenced naturalists like John Burroughs John Muir E O Wilson Edwin Way Teale Joseph Wood Krutch B F Skinner David Brower and Loren Eiseley whom Publishers Weekly called the modern Thoreau 120 Thoreau s friend William Ellery Channing published his first biography Thoreau the Poet Naturalist in 1873 121 English writer Henry Stephens Salt wrote a biography of Thoreau in 1890 which popularized Thoreau s ideas in Britain George Bernard Shaw Edward Carpenter and Robert Blatchford were among those who became Thoreau enthusiasts as a result of Salt s advocacy 122 Mohandas Gandhi first read Walden in 1906 while working as a civil rights activist in Johannesburg South Africa He first read Civil Disobedience while he sat in a South African prison for the crime of nonviolently protesting discrimination against the Indian population in the Transvaal The essay galvanized Gandhi who wrote and published a synopsis of Thoreau s argument calling its incisive logic unanswerable and referring to Thoreau as one of the greatest and most moral men America has produced 123 124 He told American reporter Webb Miller Thoreau s ideas influenced me greatly I adopted some of them and recommended the study of Thoreau to all of my friends who were helping me in the cause of Indian Independence Why I actually took the name of my movement from Thoreau s essay On the Duty of Civil Disobedience written about 80 years ago 125 Martin Luther King Jr noted in his autobiography that his first encounter with the idea of nonviolent resistance was reading On Civil Disobedience in 1944 while attending Morehouse College He wrote in his autobiography that it was Here in this courageous New Englander s refusal to pay his taxes and his choice of jail rather than support a war that would spread slavery s territory into Mexico I made my first contact with the theory of nonviolent resistance Fascinated by the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil system I was so deeply moved that I reread the work several times I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good No other person has been more eloquent and passionate in getting this idea across than Henry David Thoreau As a result of his writings and personal witness we are the heirs of a legacy of creative protest The teachings of Thoreau came alive in our civil rights movement indeed they are more alive than ever before Whether expressed in a sit in at lunch counters a freedom ride into Mississippi a peaceful protest in Albany Georgia a bus boycott in Montgomery Alabama these are outgrowths of Thoreau s insistence that evil must be resisted and that no moral man can patiently adjust to injustice 126 American psychologist B F Skinner wrote that he carried a copy of Thoreau s Walden with him in his youth 127 In 1945 he wrote Walden Two a fictional utopia about 1 000 members of a community living together inspired by the life of Thoreau 128 Thoreau and his fellow Transcendentalists from Concord were a major inspiration of the composer Charles Ives The 4th movement of the Concord Sonata for piano with a part for flute Thoreau s instrument is a character picture and he also set Thoreau s words 129 Actor Ron Thompson did a dramatic portrayal of Henry David Thoreau on the 1976 NBC television series The Rebels 130 131 132 Thoreau s ideas have impacted and resonated with various strains in the anarchist movement with Emma Goldman referring to him as the greatest American anarchist 133 Green anarchism and anarcho primitivism in particular have both derived inspiration and ecological points of view from the writings of Thoreau John Zerzan included Thoreau s text Excursions 1863 in his edited compilation of works in the anarcho primitivist tradition titled Against civilization Readings and reflections 134 Additionally Murray Rothbard the founder of anarcho capitalism has opined that Thoreau was one of the great intellectual heroes of his movement 115 Thoreau was also an important influence on late 19th century anarchist naturism 135 136 Globally Thoreau s concepts also held importance within individualist anarchist circles 137 138 in Spain 135 136 137 France 137 139 and Portugal 140 For the 200th anniversary of his birth publishers released several new editions of his work a recreation of Walden s 1902 edition with illustrations a picture book with excerpts from Walden and an annotated collection of Thoreau s essays on slavery 141 The United States Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp honoring Thoreau on May 23 2017 in Concord MA 142 Criticism EditThoreau s work and career received little attention until 1865 when the North American Review published James Russell Lowell s review of various papers of Thoreau s that Emerson had collected and edited 143 Lowell s essay Letters to Various Persons 144 which Lowell republished as a chapter in his My Study Windows 145 derided Thoreau as a humorless poseur trafficking in commonplaces a sentimentalist lacking in imagination a Diogenes in his barrel resentfully criticizing what he could not attain 146 Lowell s caustic analysis influenced Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson 147 who criticized Thoreau as a skulker saying He did not wish virtue to go out of him among his fellow men but slunk into a corner to hoard it for himself 148 Nathaniel Hawthorne had mixed feelings about Thoreau He noted that He is a keen and delicate observer of nature a genuine observer which I suspect is almost as rare a character as even an original poet and Nature in return for his love seems to adopt him as her especial child and shows him secrets which few others are allowed to witness 149 On the other hand he also wrote that Thoreau repudiated all regular modes of getting a living and seems inclined to lead a sort of Indian life among civilized men 150 151 In a similar vein poet John Greenleaf Whittier detested what he deemed to be the wicked and heathenish message of Walden claiming that Thoreau wanted man to lower himself to the level of a woodchuck and walk on four legs 152 In response to such criticisms English novelist George Eliot writing for the Westminster Review characterized such critics as uninspired and narrow minded People very wise in their own eyes who would have every man s life ordered according to a particular pattern and who are intolerant of every existence the utility of which is not palpable to them may pooh pooh Mr Thoreau and this episode in his history as unpractical and dreamy 153 Thoreau himself also responded to the criticism in a paragraph of his work Walden by illustrating the irrelevance of their inquiries I should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice of my readers if very particular inquiries had not been made by my townsmen concerning my mode of life which some would call impertinent though they do not appear to me at all impertinent but considering the circumstances very natural and pertinent Some have asked what I got to eat if I did not feel lonesome if I was not afraid and the like Others have been curious to learn what portion of my income I devoted to charitable purposes and some who have large families how many poor children I maintained Unfortunately I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience Moreover I on my side require of every writer first or last a simple and sincere account of his own life and not merely what he has heard of other men s lives I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat for it may do good service to him whom it fits 154 Recent criticism has accused Thoreau of hypocrisy misanthropy and being sanctimonious based on his writings in Walden 155 although this criticism has been perceived as highly selective 156 157 158 Selected works EditMany of Thoreau s works were not published during his lifetime including his journals and numerous unfinished manuscripts Aulus Persius Flaccus 1840 159 The Service 1840 101 A Walk to Wachusett 1842 160 Paradise to be Regained 1843 161 The Landlord 1843 162 Sir Walter Raleigh 1844 Herald of Freedom 1844 163 Wendell Phillips Before the Concord Lyceum 1845 164 Reform and the Reformers 1846 48 Thomas Carlyle and His Works 1847 165 A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers 1849 166 Resistance to Civil Government or Civil Disobedience or On the Duty of Civil Disobedience 1849 167 An Excursion to Canada 1853 168 Slavery in Massachusetts 1854 169 Walden 1854 170 A Plea for Captain John Brown 1859 171 Remarks After the Hanging of John Brown 1859 172 The Last Days of John Brown 1860 99 Walking 1862 173 Autumnal Tints 1862 174 Wild Apples The History of the Apple Tree 1862 175 The Fall of the Leaf 1863 103 176 Excursions 1863 177 Life Without Principle 1863 178 Night and Moonlight 1863 179 The Highland Light 1864 180 The Maine Woods 1864 181 182 Fully Annotated Edition Jeffrey S Cramer ed Yale University Press 2009 Cape Cod 1865 183 Letters to Various Persons 1865 184 A Yankee in Canada with Anti Slavery and Reform Papers 1866 185 Early Spring in Massachusetts 1881 Summer 1884 186 Winter 1888 187 Autumn 1892 188 Miscellanies 1894 189 Familiar Letters of Henry David Thoreau 1894 190 Poems of Nature 1895 180 Some Unpublished Letters of Henry D and Sophia E Thoreau 1898 180 The First and Last Journeys of Thoreau 1905 191 192 Journal of Henry David Thoreau 1906 193 The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau edited by Walter Harding and Carl Bode Washington Square New York University Press 1958 194 I Was Made Erect and Lone 195 The Bluebird Carries the Sky on His Back Stanyan 1970 196 The Dispersion of Seeds published as Faith in a Seed Island Press 1993 197 The Indian Notebooks 1847 1861 selections by Richard F Fleck Wild Fruits Unfinished at his death W W Norton 1999 198 199 See also EditAmerican philosophy List of American philosophers List of peace activists Thoreau Society Walden Woods ProjectReferences Edit a b c d e Furtak Rick Henry David Thoreau The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Archived from the original on August 13 2013 Retrieved July 27 2013 Seelinger Robert A 2013 Stolen Fire Aeschylean imagery and Thoreau s identification of the Graius homo of Lucretius with Prometheus Studia Humaniora Tartuensia 14 1 20 doi 10 12697 sht 2013 14 A 2 Henry David Thoreau Biography amp Works Encyclopedia Britannica Archived from the original on March 16 2019 Retrieved July 8 2019 Howe Daniel Walker What Hath God Wrought The Transformation of America 1815 1848 ISBN 978 0 19 507894 7 p 623 a b c d e f g h i Thoreau Henry David A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers Walden The Maine Woods Cape Cod Library of America ISBN 0 940450 27 5 a b Rosenwald Lawrence The Theory Practice and Influence of Thoreau s Civil Disobedience William Cain ed 2006 A Historical Guide to Henry David Thoreau Cambridge Oxford University Press Archived at archive today archived October 14 2013 Seligman Edwin Robert Anderson Johnson Alvin Saunders eds 1937 Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences p 12 Gross David ed The Price of Freedom Political Philosophy from Thoreau s Journals p 8 ISBN 978 1 4348 0552 2 The Thoreau of these journals distrusted doctrine and though it is accurate I think to call him an anarchist he was by no means doctrinaire in this either a b c d Thoreau Henry David 1849 Resistance to Civil Government Archived June 5 2011 at the Wayback Machine Retrieved October 2 2020 via Sniggle THUR oh or Thor OH And How Do We Know Archived March 23 2017 at the Wayback Machine Thoreau Reader Thoreau s Walden Archived October 30 2013 at the Wayback Machine under the sidebar Pronouncing Thoreau See the note on pronouncing the name at the Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods Archived July 27 2019 at the Wayback Machine Thoreau Dictionary com 2013 Archived from the original on August 27 2021 Retrieved February 17 2013 Wells J C 1990 Pronunciation Dictionary s v Thoreau Essex UK Longman Thoreau Henry David 1865 Chapter 10 A Provincetown Cape Cod Archived from the original on August 22 2017 Retrieved February 13 2007 Harding Walter The Days of Henry Thoreau thoreau eserver org Archived from the original on November 14 2016 Retrieved February 9 2015 Nelson Randy F 1981 The Almanac of American Letters Los Altos California William Kaufmann p 51 ISBN 0 86576 008 X a b c McElroy Wendy July 30 2005 Henry David Thoreau and Civil Disobedience Archived June 20 2015 at the Wayback Machine LewRockwell com Henry David Thoreau A Biography Twenty First Century Books December 22 2006 ISBN 9780822558934 RootsWeb s WorldConnect Project Ancestors of Mary Ann Gillam and Stephen Old Archived from the original on October 16 2008 Retrieved September 2 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Homes of Henry David Thoreau Electrum Magazine Retrieved May 16 2022 The Writings of Henry D Thoreau thoreau library ucsb edu Retrieved May 16 2022 Organizations Thoreau Joined Thoreau Society Archived from the original on May 3 2013 Retrieved June 26 2014 Thoreau s Diploma American Literature Vol 17 May 1945 pp 174 175 Walter Harding June 4 1984 Live Your Own Life Geneseo Summer Compass Archived from the original on January 29 2006 Retrieved November 21 2009 Thoreau Farm thoreaufarm org Archived from the original on October 30 2019 Retrieved April 23 2013 a b c Sattelmeyer Robert 1988 Thoreau s Reading A Study in Intellectual History with Bibliographical Catalogue Chapter 2 Archived September 8 2015 at the Wayback Machine Princeton Princeton University Press The History of Concord Massachusetts Vol I Colonial Concord Volume 1 Alfred Sereno Hudson 1904 p 311 Dean Bradley P A Thoreau Chronology Archived June 20 2017 at the Wayback Machine Myerson Joel 1994 Barzillai Frost s Funeral Sermon on the Death of John Thoreau Jr Huntington Library Quarterly 57 4 367 376 doi 10 2307 3817844 JSTOR 3817844 Woodlief Ann Henry David Thoreau Archived October 9 2019 at the Wayback Machine Aulus Persius Flaccus PDF Archived from the original PDF on September 25 2012 The Dial Walden org Archived from the original on October 18 2015 Thoreau Henry David 2007 I to Myself An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D Thoreau Jeffrey S Cramer ed New Haven Yale University Press p 1 a b c Cheever Susan 2006 American Bloomsbury Louisa May Alcott Ralph Waldo Emerson Margaret Fuller Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau Their Lives Their Loves Their Work Detroit Thorndike Press p 90 ISBN 0 7862 9521 X Salt H S 1890 The Life of Henry David Thoreau London Richard Bentley amp Son p 69 Sanborn F B ed 1906 The Writings of Henry David Thoreau Vol VI Familiar Letters Chapter 1 Years of Discipline Archived September 7 2015 at the Wayback Machine Boston Houghton Mifflin Petroski Henry 1992 The Pencil A History of Design and Circumstance New York Knopf pp 104 125 ISBN 9780679734154 Conrad Randall Fall 2005 Machine in the Wetland Re imagining Thoreau s Plumbago Grinder Archived June 9 2007 at the Wayback Machine Thoreau Society Bulletin Archived December 23 2007 at the Wayback Machine 253 A Chronology of Thoreau s Life with Events of the Times Archived February 13 2016 at the Wayback Machine The Thoreau Project Calliope Film Resources Accessed June 11 2007 Grammardog Guide to Walden Grammardog p 25 ISBN 1 60857 084 3 Packer 2007 p 183 Richardson Emerson The Mind on Fire p 399 Google Maps Archived from the original on January 25 2020 Retrieved October 13 2018 Gravett Sharon L 1995 Carlyle s Demanding Companion Henry David Thoreau Carlyle Studies Annual Saint Joseph s University Press 15 21 31 JSTOR 44946086 via JSTOR Thoreau H D letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson February 23 1848 Alcott Bronson 1938 Journals Boston Little Brown Morrissociety org PDF Archived from the original PDF on January 5 2011 Thoreausociety org Archived from the original on November 29 2010 Frost Robert 1968 Letter to Wade Van Dore June 24 1922 in Twentieth Century Interpretations of Walden Richard Ruland ed Englewood Cliffs N J Prentice Hall p 8 LCCN 68 14480 Updike John 2004 A Sage for All Seasons The Guardian Archived August 27 2021 at the Wayback Machine Ehrlich Eugene Carruth Gorton 1982 The Oxford Illustrated Literary Guide to the United States New York Oxford University Press p 45 ISBN 0 19 503186 5 Weisman Adam Paul Autumn 1995 Postcolonialism in North America Imaginative Colonization in Henry David Thoreau s A Yankee in Canada and Jacques Poulin s Volkswagen Blues The Massachusetts Review 36 3 478 479 Thoreau Henry David 1961 A Yankee in Canada Montreal Harvest House p 13 a b Lacroix Patrick Fall 2017 Finding Thoreau in French Canada The Ideological Legacy of the American Revolution American Review of Canadian Studies 47 3 266 279 doi 10 1080 02722011 2017 1370719 S2CID 148808283 Letters to H G O Blake Archived June 17 2011 at the Wayback Machine Walden org Thoreau Henry David 1862 Autumnal Tints The Atlantic Monthly October pp 385 402 Reprint Archived March 7 2010 at the Wayback Machine Retrieved November 21 2009 Thorson Robert M December 6 2013 Walden s Shore Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth Century Science Cambridge Massachusetts Harvard University Press ISBN 978 0674724785 Primack Richard B June 13 2013 Tracking Climate Change with the Help of Henry David Thoreau Archived from the original on September 23 2015 Retrieved September 23 2015 Worster Donald 1977 Nature s Economy New York Cambridge University pp 69 71 ISBN 0 521 45273 2 Thoreau Henry David 1970 The Annotated Walden Philip Van Doren Stern ed pp 96 132 Christie John Aldrich 1965 Thoreau as World Traveler New York Columbia University Press Letters of H G O Blake Archived June 17 2011 at the Wayback Machine in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau The Digital Collection Reynolds David S 2005 John Brown Abolitionist Knopf p 4 Richardson Robert D Jr 1993 Introduction In Dean Bradley P ed Faith in a Seed The First Publication of Thoreau s Last Manuscript Washington D C Island Press p 17 About Thoreau Thoreau the Man Archived June 20 2016 at the Wayback Machine Thoreau Chronology Archived June 20 2017 at the Wayback Machine Critchley Simon 2009 The Book of Dead Philosophers New York Random House p 181 ISBN 978 0307472632 Archived from the original on August 27 2021 Retrieved June 20 2015 The Writer s Almanac American Public Media Archived from the original on July 8 2017 Retrieved June 1 2017 Packer Barbara L 2007 The Transcendentalists Athens Georgia University of Georgia Press p 272 ISBN 978 0 8203 2958 1 Emerson Ralph Waldo August 1862 Thoreau The Atlantic Walden or Life in the Woods Chapter 1 Economy Nathaniel Hawthorne Passages From the American Note Books entry for September 2 1842 Brooks Van Wyck The Flowering of New England New York E P Dutton and Company Inc 1952 p 310 a b Cheever Susan 2006 American Bloomsbury Louisa May Alcott Ralph Waldo Emerson Margaret Fuller Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry David Thoreau Their Lives Their Loves Their Work Detroit Thorndike Press Large print edition p 241 ISBN 0 7862 9521 X Nash Roderick Wilderness and the American Mind Henry David Thoreau Philosopher Knoles Thomas 2016 Introduction American Antiquarian Society Retrieved December 17 2021 She was in Watertown when Henry wrote to her with his own proposal probably in early November 1840 I wrote to H T that evening I never felt so badly at sending a letter in my life a b c Harding Walter 1991 Thoreau s Sexuality Journal of Homosexuality 21 3 pp 23 45 Quinby Lee 1999 Millennial Seduction Cornell University Press p 68 ISBN 978 0801486012 Bronski Michael 2012 A Queer History of the United States Beacon Press p 50 ISBN 978 0807044650 Michael Warner 1991 Walden s Erotic Economy in Comparative American Identities Race Sex and Nationality in the Modern Text Hortense Spillers ed New York Routledge pp 157 173 Robbins Paula Ivaska The Natural Thoreau The Gay And Lesbian Review September October 2011 ProQuest 890209875 Richardson Robert Moser Barry 1986 Henry Thoreau A Life of the Mind University of California Press pp 58 63 Canby Henry Seidel 1939 Thoreau Houghton Mifflin p 117 Katz Jonathan Ned 1992 Gay American History Lesbians and Gay Men in the USA New York Meridian pp 481 492 Lopez Robert Oscar 2007 Thoreau Homer and Community in Henry David Thoreau Harold Bloom ed New York Infobase Publishing pp 153 174 Summers Claude J The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage Routledge New York 2002 p 202 Bergman David ed 2009 Gay American Autobiography Writings From Whitman to Sedaris University of Wisconsin Press p 10 Lebeaux Richard 1984 Thoreau s Seasons University of Massachusetts Press p 386 n 31 a b c The Last Days of John Brown Archived December 22 2010 at the Wayback Machine from the Writings of Henry David Thoreau The Digital Collection Thoreau Henry David 1961 A Yankee in Canada Montreal Harvest House pp 105 107 a b c The Service Archived December 22 2010 at the Wayback Machine from the Writings of Henry David Thoreau The Digital Collection Transcendental Ethos Archived September 19 2013 at the Wayback Machine from The Thoreau Reader a b The Walden Woods Project Walden org Archived from the original on June 20 2016 John Lachs and Robert Talisse 2007 American Philosophy An Encyclopedia p 310 ISBN 978 0415939263 Dickason David G 1991 The Nineteenth Century Indo American Ice Trade An Hyperborean Epic Modern Asian Studies 25 1 53 89 doi 10 1017 S0026749X00015845 ISSN 0026 749X JSTOR 312669 S2CID 144932927 Archived from the original on April 18 2021 Retrieved April 18 2021 via JSTOR Simplicity Day 2020 How Bhagavad Gita inspired American philosopher Henry David Thoreau Times of India July 12 2020 Archived from the original on April 18 2021 Retrieved April 18 2021 Davis Richard H January 2018 Henry David Thoreau Yogi Common Knowledge 24 1 56 89 doi 10 1215 0961754X 4253822 ISSN 0961 754X via Duke University Press Miller Barbara S Why Did Henry David Thoreau Take the Bhagavad Gita to Walden Pond Parabola 12 1 Spring 1986 58 63 a b Berger Michael Benjamin Thoreau s Late Career and The Dispersion of Seeds The Saunterer s Synoptic Vision ISBN 157113168X p 52 Wulf Andrea The Invention of Nature Alexander Humboldt s New World New York Alfred A Knopf 2015 p 250 Cain William E A Historical Guide to Henry David Thoreau ISBN 0195138635 p 146 Analysis and Notes on Walden Henry Thoreau s Text with Adjacent Thoreauvian Commentary Archived March 18 2006 at the Wayback Machine by Ken Kifer 2002 Appletons annual cyclopaedia and register of important events of the year 1862 New York D Appleton amp Company 1863 p 666 Pattee Fred Lewis A History of American Literature Since 1870 Ch VII pp 138 139 Appleton New York London 1915 a b Rothbard Murray Confessions of a Right Wing Liberal Archived June 18 2015 at the Wayback Machine Ramparts VI 4 June 15 1968 Maynard W Barksdale Walden Pond A History Oxford University Press 2005 p 265 Mumford Lewis The Golden Day A Study in American Experience and Culture Boni and Liveright 1926 pp 56 59 Posey Alexander Lost Creeks Collected Journals Edited by Matthew Wynn Sivils University of Nebraska Press 2009 p 38 Saunders Barry A Complex Fate Gustav Stickley and the Craftsman Movement Preservation Press 1996 p 4 Kifer Ken Analysis and Notes on Walden Henry Thoreau s Text with Adjacent Thoreauvian Commentary Archived March 18 2006 at the Wayback Machine Channing William Ellery Merrymount Press Sanborn F B Franklin Benjamin Updike Daniel Berkeley 1902 Thoreau the poet naturalist with Memorial verses University of California Libraries Boston C E Goodspeed Hendrick George and Oehlschlaeger Fritz eds Toward the Making of Thoreau s Modern Reputation University of Illinois Press 1979 McElroy Wendy May 4 2011 Here the State Is Nowhere to Be Seen Archived September 13 2014 at the Wayback Machine Mises Institute Although he was practicing civil disobedience before he read Thoreau s essay Gandhi was quick to point out the debt he owed to Thoreau and other thinkers like him Shawn Chandler Bingham Thoreau and the sociological imagination the wilds of society Lanham Md Rowman and Littlefield Publishers 2008 ISBN 978 0742560581 p 31 Miller Webb I Found No Peace Garden City 1938 238 239 King M L Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr Archived March 8 2007 at the Wayback Machine chapter two Skinner B F A Matter of Consequences Skinner B F Walden Two 1948 Burkholder James Peter Charles Ives and His World Princeton University Press 1996 pp 50 51 Tele Vues Sunday June 6 1976 Independent Press Telegram Long Beach California June 6 1976 p 170 Archived from the original on November 5 2018 Retrieved October 27 2015 TV Log Redlands Daily Facts Redlands California June 5 1976 p 10 Archived from the original on September 29 2015 Retrieved October 27 2015 Actor Ron Thompson as Henry David Thoreau in The Rebels NBC June 6 1976 Archived from the original on December 11 2021 Goldman Emma 1917 Anarchism and Other Essays Mother Earth Publishing Association p 62 Zerzan John Against Civilization Readings And Reflections Archived from the original on August 7 2020 Retrieved December 13 2017 via Amazon a b El naturismo libertario en la Peninsula Iberica 1890 1939 by Jose Maria Rosello PDF Archived from the original PDF on January 2 2016 a b Ortega Carlos Anarchism Nudism Naturism Archived from the original on September 9 2020 Retrieved July 20 2018 a b c La insumision voluntaria El anarquismo individualista Espanol durante la dictadura y la segunda Republica 1923 1938 by Xavier Diez Archived from the original on May 26 2006 Les anarchistes individualistes du debut du siecle l avaient bien compris et integraient le naturisme dans leurs preoccupations Il est vraiment dommage que ce discours se soit peu a peu efface d antan plus que nous assistons en ce moment a un retour en force du puritanisme conservateur par essence Anarchisme et naturisme aujourd hui by Cathy Ytak Archived February 25 2009 at the Wayback Machine Recension des articles de l En Dehors consacres au naturisme et au nudisme Archived October 14 2008 at the Wayback Machine Freire Joao Anarchisme et naturisme au Portugal dans les annees 1920 in Les anarchistes du Portugal Bibliographic data necessary for this ref Williams John July 7 2017 Alcoholism in America The New York Times ISSN 0362 4331 Archived from the original on August 4 2017 Retrieved August 23 2017 American Philatelic Society stamps org Archived from the original on August 6 2018 Retrieved August 10 2018 Pattee A History of American Literature Since 1870 pp 137 138 Lowell James Russell Letters to Various Persons in The North American Review Vol CI No 209 pp 597 608 October 1865 Lowell James Russell My Study Windows Ch VII pp 193 209 Osgood Boston 1871 Pattee A History of American Literature Since 1870 p 138 Pattee A History of American Literature Since 1870 p 138 Stevenson Robert Louis 1880 Henry David Thoreau His Character and Opinions Cornhill Magazine Archived from the original on October 12 2006 Retrieved December 3 2021 Now 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 Nathaniel Hawthorne Passages From the American Note Books entry for September 2 1842 Hawthorne The Heart of Hawthorne s Journals p 106 Borst Raymond R The Thoreau Log A Documentary Life of Henry David Thoreau 1817 1862 New York G K Hall 1992 Wagenknecht Edward John Greenleaf Whittier A Portrait in Paradox New York Oxford University Press 1967 112 The New England Quarterly Vol 6 No 4 Dec 1933 pp 733 746 Thoreau Walden 1854 Schultz Kathryn October 19 2015 Henry David Thoreau Hypocrite The New Yorker Archived from the original on October 19 2015 Retrieved October 19 2015 Why do we love Thoreau Because he was right Medium October 19 2015 Archived from the original on October 19 2015 Retrieved October 19 2015 Malesic Jonathan October 19 2015 Henry David Thoreau s Radical Optimism New Republic Archived from the original on October 19 2015 Retrieved October 19 2015 Hohn Donovan October 21 2015 Everybody Hates Henry New Republic Archived from the original on October 26 2015 Retrieved October 21 2015 Aulus Persius Flaccus Archived December 22 2010 at the Wayback Machine from the Writings of Henry David Thoreau The Digital Collection A Walk to Wachusett Archived December 22 2010 at the Wayback Machine from the Writings of Henry David Thoreau The Digital Collection Paradise to be Regained Archived December 22 2010 at the Wayback Machine from the Writings of Henry David Thoreau The Digital Collection Browse Cornell University Library Making of America Collection collections library cornell edu Herald of Freedom Archived December 22 2010 at the Wayback Machine from the Writings of Henry David Thoreau The Digital Collection Wendell Phillips Before the Concord Lyceum Archived December 22 2010 at the Wayback Machine from the Writings of Henry David Thoreau The Digital Collection Thomas Carlyle and His Works Archived December 22 2010 at the Wayback Machine from the Writings of Henry David Thoreau The Digital Collection A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers from Project Gutenberg Archived from the original on December 23 2018 Retrieved December 22 2018 Peabody Elizabeth Palmer Emerson Ralph Waldo Hawthorne Nathaniel Thoreau Henry David January 1 1849 Aesthetic papers Boston The editor New York G P Putnam via Internet Archive A Yankee in Canada Archived June 17 2011 at the Wayback Machine from the Writings of Henry David Thoreau The Digital Collection Slavery in Massachusetts Archived December 22 2010 at the Wayback Machine from the Writings of Henry David Thoreau The Digital Collection Walden Archived September 26 2010 at the Wayback Machine from the Writings of Henry David Thoreau The Digital Collection A Plea for Captain John Brown Archived December 22 2010 at the Wayback Machine from the Writings of Henry David Thoreau The Digital Collection After the Death of John Brown Archived December 22 2010 at the Wayback Machine from the Writings of Henry David Thoreau The Digital Collection Walking Archived from the original on December 23 2018 Retrieved December 22 2018 Autumnal Tints Archived December 22 2010 at the Wayback Machine from the Writings of Henry David Thoreau The Digital Collection Wild Apples from Project Gutenberg Archived from the original on December 26 2007 Retrieved November 6 2003 Henry David Thoreau Bradford Torrey Franklin Benjamin Sanborn 1863 The Writings of Henry David Thoreau Excursions translations and poems The Riverside Press Cambridge pp 407 408 Archived from the original on April 14 2021 Retrieved November 16 2015 Thoreau Henry David Houghton H O amp Company 1863 bkp CU BANC Emerson Ralph Waldo Thoreau Sophia E January 1 1863 Excursions Boston Ticknor and Fields via Internet Archive The Atlantic Monthly Volume 0012 Issue 71 September 1863 Archived from the original on July 7 2012 Retrieved March 2 2008 The Atlantic Monthly Volume 0012 Issue 72 November 1863 Archived from the original on July 8 2012 Retrieved March 2 2008 a b c Henry David Thoreau 1817 1862 ebooks adelaide edu The University of Adelaide Archived from the original on August 24 2017 Retrieved January 1 2018 The Maine Woods Archived August 11 2008 at the Wayback Machine from The Thoreau Reader Thoreau Henry David Thoreau Sophia E Channing William Ellery January 1 1864 The Maine woods Boston Ticknor and Fields via Internet Archive Lenat Richard Thoreau s Cape Cod an annotated edition Archived from the original on August 22 2008 Retrieved September 2 2008 Thoreau Henry David January 1 1865 Letters to various persons Boston Ticknor and Fields via Internet Archive Thoreau Henry David January 1 1866 A Yankee in Canada with Anti slavery and reform papers Boston Ticknor and Fields via Internet Archive Thoreau Henry David Blake H G O Harrison Gray Otis January 1 1884 Summer from the Journal of Henry D Thoreau London T Fisher Unwin via Internet Archive Thoreau Henry David Blake H G O January 1 1888 Winter from the Journal of Henry D Thoreau Boston Houghton Mifflin via Internet Archive Thoreau Henry David Blake Harrison Gray Otis December 3 1892 Autumn From the Journal of Henry D Thoreau Boston Houghton Mifflin via Internet Archive Miscellanies from the Writings of Henry David Thoreau The Digital Collection Thoreau Henry David Sanborn F B Franklin Benjamin January 1 1894 Familiar letters of Henry David Thoreau Boston Houghton Mifflin via Internet Archive Thoreau Henry David Bibliophile Society Boston Mass Bibliophile Society Boston Mass Sanborn F B Franklin Benjamin January 1 1905 The first and last journeys of Thoreau lately discovered among his unpublished journals and manuscripts Boston Printed exclusively for members of the Bibliophile Society via Internet Archive Thoreau Henry David Bibliophile Society Boston Mass Bibliophile Society Boston Mass Sanborn F B Franklin Benjamin January 1 1905 The first and last journeys of Thoreau lately discovered among his unpublished journals and manuscripts Boston Printed exclusively for members of the Bibliophile Society via Internet Archive The Journal of Henry D Thoreau Archived May 5 2010 at the Wayback Machine from the Writings of Henry David Thoreau The Digital Collection The Correspondence of Thoreau Archived June 17 2011 at the Wayback Machine from the Writings of Henry David Thoreau The Digital Collection I Was Made Erect and Lone December 3 2018 Archived from the original on February 15 2012 Retrieved December 13 2012 Rastogi Gaurav May 11 2015 The bluebird carries the sky on his back Medium Archived from the original on January 15 2020 Retrieved January 15 2020 Thoreau Henry David 1996 Faith in a Seed The Dispersion of Seeds and Other Late Natural History Writings Island Press ISBN 978 1559631822 Retrieved January 29 2018 Thoreau Henry David 2000 Bradley P Dean ed Wild fruits Thoreau s rediscovered last manuscript 1st ed New York W W Norton ISBN 0 393 04751 2 OCLC 41404600 Richard Frances Thoreau s Wild Fruits Frances Richard cabinetmagazine org Archived from the original on April 24 2021 Retrieved April 11 2021 Further reading EditBalthrop Lewis Alda Exemplarist Environmental Ethics Thoreau s Political Ascetism against Solution Thinking Journal of Religious Ethics 47 3 2019 525 550 Bode Carl Best of Thoreau s Journals Southern Illinois University Press 1967 Botkin Daniel No Man s Garden Buell Lawrence The Environmental Imagination Thoreau Nature Writing and the Formation of American Culture Harvard UP 1995 Cafaro Philip Thoreau s Living Ethics Walden and the Pursuit of Virtue U of Georgia Press 2004 Chodorov Frank The Disarming Honesty of Henry David Thoreau Archived September 14 2014 at the Wayback Machine Conrad Randall Who He Was amp Why He Matters Archived October 12 2006 at the Wayback Machine Cramer Jeffrey S Solid Seasons The Friendship of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson Counterpoint Press 2019 Dean Bradley P ed Letters to a Spiritual Seeker New York W W Norton amp Company 2004 Finley James S ed Henry David Thoreau in Context Cambridge UP 2017 Furtak Rick Ellsworth Jonathan and Reid James D eds Thoreau s Importance for Philosophy New York Fordham University Press 2012 Gionfriddo Michael Thoreau the Work of Breathing and Building Castles in the Air Reading Walden s Conclusion The Concord Saunterer 25 2017 49 90 online Archived April 17 2021 at the Wayback Machine Guhr Sebastian Mr Lincoln amp Mr Thoreau S Marix Verlag Wiesbaden 2021 Harding Walter The Days of Henry Thoreau Princeton University Press 1982 Hendrick George The Influence of Thoreau s Civil Disobedience on Gandhi s Satyagraha The New England Quarterly 29 no 4 December 1956 462 471 Hess Scott 2019 Walden Pond as Thoreau s Landscape of Genius Nineteenth Century Literature 74 2 224 250 doi 10 1525 ncl 2019 74 2 224 ISSN 0891 9356 S2CID 204481348 Howarth William The Book of Concord Thoreau s Life as a Writer Viking Press 1982 Judd Richard W Finding Thoreau The Meaning of Nature in the Making of an Environmental Icon 2018 excerpt Archived July 23 2021 at the Wayback Machine McGregor Robert Kuhn A Wider View of the Universe Henry Thoreau s Study of Nature U of Illinois Press 1997 Marble Annie Russell Thoreau His Home Friends and Books New York AMS Press 1969 1902 Myerson Joel et al The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau Cambridge University Press 1995 Nash Roderick Henry David Thoreau Philosopher Paolucci Stefano The Foundations of Thoreau s Castles in the Air Archived August 27 2021 at the Wayback Machine Thoreau Society Bulletin No 290 Summer 2015 10 See also the Full Unedited Version of the same article Parrington Vernon Main Current in American Thought Archived September 1 2006 at the Wayback Machine V 2 online 1927 Parrington Vernon L Henry Thoreau Transcendental Economist Archived June 12 2007 at the Wayback Machine Petroski Henry H D Thoreau Engineer American Heritage of Invention and Technology Vol 5 No 2 pp 8 16 Petrulionis Sandra Harbert ed Thoreau in His Own Time A Biographical Chronicle of His Life Drawn From Recollections Interviews and Memoirs by Family Friends and Associates Iowa City University of Iowa Press 2012 ISBN 1 60938 087 8 Richardson Robert D Henry Thoreau A Life of the Mind University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles 1986 ISBN 0 520 06346 5 Riggenbach Jeff 2008 Thoreau Henry David 1817 1862 In Hamowy Ronald ed The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism Thousand Oaks California Sage Cato Institute pp 506 507 doi 10 4135 9781412965811 n309 ISBN 978 1412965804 LCCN 2008009151 OCLC 750831024 Archived from the original on September 30 2020 Retrieved June 20 2015 Riggenbach Jeff July 15 2010 Henry David Thoreau Founding Father of American Libertarian Thought Mises Daily Archived from the original on September 14 2014 Retrieved September 13 2014 Ridl Jack Moose Indian Archived August 27 2021 at the Wayback Machine Scintilla poem on Thoreau s last words Schneider Richard Civilizing Thoreau Human Ecology and the Emerging Social Sciences in the Major Works Rochester New York Camden House 2016 ISBN 978 1 57113 960 3 Smith David C The Transcendental Saunterer Thoreau and the Search for Self Savannah Georgia Frederic C Beil 1997 ISBN 0 913720 74 7 Sullivan Mark W Henry David Thoreau in the American Art of the 1950s The Concord Saunterer A Journal of Thoreau Studies New Series Vol 18 2010 pp 68 89 Sullivan Mark W Picturing Thoreau Henry David Thoreau in American Visual Culture Lanham Maryland Lexington Books 2015 Tauber Alfred I Henry David Thoreau and the Moral Agency of Knowing University of California Berkeley 2001 ISBN 0 520 23915 6 Henry David Thoreau Archived March 4 2016 at the Wayback Machine Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy Henry David Thoreau Archived December 4 2010 at the Wayback Machine Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Thorson Robert M The Boatman Henry David Thoreau s River Years Harvard UP 2017 on his scientific study of the Concord River in the late 1850s Thorson Robert M Walden s Shore Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth Century Science 2015 Thorson Robert M The Guide to Walden Pond An Exploration of the History Nature Landscape and Literature of One of America s Most Iconic Places 2018 Traub Courtney 2015 First Rate Fellows Excavating Thoreau s Radical Egalitarian Reflections in a Late Draft of Allegash The Concord Saunterer A Journal of Thoreau Studies 23 74 96 Walls Laura Dassow Seeing New Worlds Henry David Thoreau and 19th Century Science University of Wisconsin 1995 ISBN 0 299 14744 4 Walls Laura Dassow Henry David Thoreau A Life The University of Chicago Press 2017 ISBN 978 0 226 34469 0 Ward John William 1969 Red White and Blue Men Books and Ideas in American Culture New York Oxford University PressExternal links Edit Wikisource has original works by or about Henry David Thoreau Wikiquote has quotations related to Henry David Thoreau Wikimedia Commons has media related to Henry David Thoreau Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica article Thoreau Henry David The Thoreau Society The Thoreau Edition Writings of Emerson and Thoreau from C SPAN s American Writers A Journey Through HistoryTexts Edit Works by Henry David Thoreau in eBook form at Standard Ebooks Works by Henry David Thoreau at Project Gutenberg Works by Henry D Thoreau at Faded Page Canada Works by or about Henry David Thoreau at Internet Archive Works by Henry David Thoreau at LibriVox public domain audiobooks Works by Thoreau at Open Library Poems by Thoreau Archived October 19 2017 at the Wayback Machine at the Academy of American Poets The Thoreau Reader Archived April 5 2006 at the Wayback Machine by The Thoreau Society The Writings of Henry David Thoreau at The Walden Woods Project Scans of Thoreau s Land Surveys at the Concord Free Public Library Henry David Thoreau Online The Works and Life of Henry D Thoreau Portals Biography Environment Poetry Politics United States Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Henry David Thoreau amp oldid 1136456987, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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