Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 - May 6, 1862; born 'David Henry Thoreau') was a noted American author and philosopher who is most famous for Walden, his essay on civil disobedience, and his call for the preservation of wilderness.
He was born in Concord, Massachusetts and graduated from Harvard in 1837. Thoreau never got a physical diploma from Harvard as he refused to pay the few dollars to get the "sheet of paper".
Thoreau was a philosopher of nature and its relation to the human condition. In his early years, he accepted the ideas of Transcendentalism, an eclectic philosophy that included among its advocates Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Bronson Alcott.
After college, Thoreau taught school, wrote essays and poems for The Dial, and briefly attempted freelance writing in New York City. The death of his brother in 1842 was a profound emotional shock and may have influenced his decision to live with his parents and never to marry.
Thoreau embarked on a two-year experiment in simple living on July 4, 1845 when he moved to a second-growth forest around the shores of beautiful Walden Pond, not far from his friends and family in Concord. He left Walden Pond on September 6, 1847 to live with his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emerson's family in Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau refused to pay taxes in 1846, based on his opposition to the Mexican War, and was later jailed. He described this event in his popular essay 'Civil Disobedience', which influenced Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi, and Martin Luther King.
Published in 1854, Walden; or, Life in the Woods recounts the two years and two months Thoreau spent at Walden Pond. The book compresses that time into a single calendar year, using the passage of four seasons to symbolize human development. Part memoir and part spiritual quest, this American classic emerged from a nine year process of composition and revision.
At various times, Thoreau earned a living by lecturing or working at his family's pencil factory. He invented a machine that simplified production while cutting costs. Later he converted the factory to producing plumbago, used to ink typesetting machines. Frequent contact with minute particles of lead may have weakened his lungs.
After 1850 he became a land surveyor, "travelling a good deal in Concord," and writing natural history observations about the 26 mile² (67 km²) township in his Journal, a two million word document that he kept for 24 years. He also traveled to Canada, Cape Cod, and Maine, landscapes that inspired his "excursion" books, A Yankee in Canada, Cape Cod, and The Maine Woods, in which travel intineraries frame his thoughts about geography, history, and philosophy.
Hailed as the first American environmentalist, Thoreau wrote essays on autumnal foliage, the succession of forest trees, and the disperal of seeds, collected in Excursions. Scientists regard these works as anticipating ecology, the study of interactions between species, places, and seasons. He was an early advocate of recreational hiking and canoeing, of conserving natural resources on private land, and of preserving wilderness as public land. Thoreau was also one of the first American supporters of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.
Thoreau died of tuberculosis in the town of his birth, Concord. He was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord.
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