Henry David Thoreau

born July 12, 1817, Concord, Mass., U.S.
died May 6, 1862, Concord

Thoreau, portrait by Samuel Worcester Rowse, 1854
By courtesy of the Corporation of the
Free Public Library, Concord, Mass.

American essayist, poet, and practical philosopher, renowned for having lived the doctrines of Transcendentalism as recorded in his masterwork, Walden (1854), and for having been a vigorous advocate of civil liberties, as evidenced in the essay “Civil Disobedience” (1849).

Early in the spring of 1845, Thoreau, then 27 years old, began to chop down tall pines with which to build the foundations of his home on the shores of Walden Pond. From the outset the move gave him profound satisfaction. Once settled, he restricted his diet for the most part to what fruit and vegetables he found growing wild and the beans he planted and hoed. When not busy weeding his bean rows and trying to protect them from hungry woodchucks, or occupied with fishing, swimming, or rowing, he spent long hours observing and recording the local flora and fauna, reading, and writing A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and making entries in his journals, which later he would polish and include in Walden. Much time, too, was spent in meditation.

Out of such activity and thought came Walden, a series of 18 essays describing his experiment in basic living and his effort to set his time free for leisure. Several of the essays provide Thoreau's original perspective on the meaning of work and leisure and describe his experiment in living as simply and self-sufficiently as possible, while in others Thoreau describes the various realities of life at Walden Pond: his intimacy with the small animals he came in contact with; the sounds, smells, and look of woods and water at various seasons; the music of wind in telegraph wires—in short, the felicities of learning how to fulfill his desire to live as simply and self-sufficiently as possible. The physical act of living day by day at Walden Pond is what gives the book authority, while Thoreau's command of a clear, straightforward, but elegant style helped raise it to the level of a literary classic.

Thoreau stayed for two years at Walden Pond (1845–47). In the summer of 1847 Emerson invited him to stay with his wife and children again, while Emerson himself went to Europe. Thoreau accepted. In September 1847 he left his cabin forever.

Major Works:
The most significant and enduring works by Thoreau are listed here in order of original publication; when he made substantial revisions, especially in the essays, the volumes in which the revised versions first appeared are likewise noted:“Ktaadn and the Maine Woods” (1848; revised and expanded in The Maine Woods, 1864); A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849); “Resistance to Civil Government” (1849; republished as “Civil Disobedience” in A Yankee in Canada, 1866); Walden (1854); “The Last Days of John Brown” (1860; republished in A Yankee in Canada); “Walking” (1862; republished in Excursions, 1863); “Life Without Principle” (1863; republished in A Yankee in Canada); and Faith in a Seed: The Dispersion of Seeds and Other Late Natural History Writings (posthumously, 1993).The Writings of Henry Thoreau, 20 vol. (1906, reprinted 1982), is the standard “Walden” edition of Thoreau's books, essays, and journal. It is being replaced by the Princeton Edition of The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau (starting in 1971 with the publication of its version of Walden) which is producing books of high textual and editorial quality. Collected Poems, ed. by Carl Bode, enlarged ed. (1964, reissued 1970), brings together the many versions of the poetry he wrote, particularly in his younger days.

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