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Henry David Thoreau

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Philosophers

                           Henry David Thoreau

   Central topics

                             Henry David Thoreau
                               Thoreau Society
                        A Plea for Captain John Brown
                             A Walk to Wachusett
                             Civil Disobedience
                          Slavery in Massachusetts
                                   Walden
     __________________________________________________________________

   Related topics

                         Abolitionism — Anarchism
                       Anarchism in the United States
                             Civil disobedience
                           Concord, Massachusetts
                           Conscientious objection
                          Direct action — Ecology
                              Environmentalism
                          History of tax resistance
                           Individualist anarchism
                       John Brown — Lyceum movement
                            Nonviolent resistance
                             Ralph Waldo Emerson
                      Simple living — Tax resistance
                     Tax resisters — Transcendentalism
                       The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail
                                 Walden Pond

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   Henry David Thoreau ( July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862; born David Henry
   Thoreau) was an American author, naturalist, transcendentalist, tax
   resister, development critic, and philosopher who is most well-known
   for Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings,
   and his essay, Civil Disobedience, an argument for individual
   resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state.
   Thoreau was famous for saying: “Any fool can make a rule, and any fool
   will mind it.” Thoreau’s books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry
   total over 20 volumes. His ideas influenced the development of
   anarchism, and are most evident with the American anarchists, the
   pacifist Leo Tolstoy, and the nonviolent activism developer Mohandas K.
   Gandhi.

   He 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. Among his lasting contributions
   were his writings on natural history and philosophy, where he
   anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental
   history, two sources of modern day environmentalism. His philosophy had
   tremendous influence on leaders like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Early Years: 1817-1844

   David Henry Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts to John Thoreau
   and Cynthia Dunbar. His paternal grandfather was of French origin and
   born on the Isle of Jersey. David Henry was named after a recently
   deceased paternal uncle, David Thoreau. He did not become “Henry David”
   until after college, although he never petitioned to make a legal name
   change. He had two older siblings, Helen and John Jr., and a younger
   sister, Sophia. Thoreau’s birthplace still exists on Virginia Road in
   Concord and is the focus of current preservation efforts. The house is
   original, but it now stands about 100 yards away from its first site.

   Bronson Alcott noted in his journal that Thoreau pronounced his family
   name THOR-eau, accented on the first syllable, not the last as is
   common today. A Concord variant is THUR-eau, like the standard American
   pronunciation of the word “thorough.” In appearance he was homely, with
   a nose that he called “my most prominent feature” (Cape Cod). Of his
   face, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote: “[Thoreau] is as ugly as sin,
   long-nosed, queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and rustic, though
   courteous manners, corresponding very well with such an exterior. But
   his ugliness is of an honest and agreeable fashion, and becomes him
   much better than beauty.”

   Thoreau studied at Harvard between 1833 and 1837. He lived in Hollis
   Hall and took courses in rhetoric, classics, philosophy, mathematics,
   and science. Legend states that Thoreau refused to pay the five-dollar
   fee for a Harvard diploma. In fact, the Masters’ degree he declined to
   purchase had no academic merit: 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” (Thoreau's
   Diploma). His comment was: “Let every sheep keep its own skin.”

   During a leave of absence from Harvard in 1835, Thoreau taught school
   in Canton, Massachusetts. After graduating in 1837, he joined the
   faculty of Concord Academy, but he refused to administer corporal
   punishment and the school board soon dismissed him. He and his brother
   John then opened a grammar school in Concord in 1838. They introduced
   several progressive concepts, including nature walks and visits to
   local shops and businesses. The school ended when John became fatally
   ill from tetanus in 1841. He was later seen giving lectures at the
   Concord Lyceum.

   Upon graduation, Thoreau returned home, where he befriended Ralph Waldo
   Emerson. Emerson took a paternal and at times patronizing 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, Nathaniel Hawthorne and his son Julian, who was a boy
   at the time. Of the many prominent authors who lived in Concord,
   Thoreau was the only town native. Emerson referred to him as the man of
   Concord.

   Emerson constantly urged Thoreau to contribute essays and poems to a
   quarterly periodical, The Dial, and Emerson lobbied with editor
   Margaret Fuller to publish those writings. Thoreau’s first essay
   published there was Natural History of Massachusetts; half book review,
   half natural history essay, it appeared in 1842. It consisted of
   revised passages from his journal, which he had begun keeping at
   Emerson’s suggestion. The first entry on October 22, 1837 reads, “‘What
   are you doing now?’ he asked. ‘Do you keep a journal?’ So I make my
   first entry today.”

   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).

   In 1841 Thoreau joined the Emerson household to serve as children’s
   tutor, editorial assistant, and repair man/gardener. For a few months
   in 1843, he moved to the home of William Emerson on Staten Island,
   tutoring the family sons while writing for New York periodicals, aided
   in part by his future literary representative Horace Greeley . Thoreau
   returned to Concord and had a restless period: he worked in the family
   pencil shop, accidentally burned a large patch of local forest, and
   searched for a farm to buy or lease. He wanted to support himself while
   having enough solitude to write a first book.

Walden Years: 1845–1847

   A reproduction of Thoreau’s cabin with a statue of Thoreau
   Enlarge
   A reproduction of Thoreau’s cabin with a statue of Thoreau

   Thoreau embarked on a two-year experiment in simple living on July 4,
   1845, when he moved to a tiny self-built house on land owned by Emerson
   in a second-growth forest around the shores of Walden Pond. The house
   was not in wilderness but at the edge of town, 1.5 miles (2.4 km) from
   his family home.

   On one trip into town, he ran into the local tax collector 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. (Thoreau was freed the next
   day, over his loud protests, when his aunt paid his taxes.) His later
   essay on this experience and his reasons for taking this stand, Civil
   Disobedience, influenced such political theorists and activists as Leo
   Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

   At Walden Pond, he completed a first draft of A Week on the Concord and
   Merrimack Rivers, an elegy to his brother, John, that described their
   1839 trip to the White Mountains, with many digressions that compile
   his early writings. Thoreau did not find a publisher for this book, and
   Emerson urged Thoreau to publish at his own expense. Thoreau did so
   with Munroe, Emerson’s own publisher, who did little to publicize the
   book. Its failure put Thoreau into debt that took years to pay off, and
   Emerson’s flawed advice caused a schism between the friends that never
   entirely healed.

   In August of 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. Over several years, he
   worked off his debts and also continuously revised his manuscript. In
   1854, he published Walden: or, Life in the Woods, 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
   four seasons to symbolize human development. Part memoir and part
   spiritual quest, Walden at first won few admirers, but today critics
   regard it as a classic American book that explores natural simplicity,
   harmony, and beauty as models for just social and cultural conditions.

Late Years: 1851-1858

   Henry David Thoreau, photograph published circa 1879
   Enlarge
   Henry David Thoreau, photograph published circa 1879

   In 1851, Thoreau became increasingly fascinated with natural history
   and travel/expedition narratives. He read avidly on the subject,
   particularly botany, and often transcribed passages into his Journal.
   He greatly admired William Bartram, and Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the
   Beagle. He kept detailed observations of Concord, recording everything
   from the how 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 words.

   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 he kept for 24
   years. He also kept a series of separate notebooks, and these
   observations became the source for Thoreau's late natural history
   writings, such as Autumnal Tints, The Succession of Trees, and Wild
   Apples, an essay bemoaning the destruction of indigenous and wild apple
   species.

   Until the 1970s, Thoreau’s late pursuits were dismissed by literary
   critics as amateur science and declined philosophy. With the rise of
   environmental history and ecocriticism, several new readings of this
   matter began to emerge, showing Thoreau to be both a philosopher and an
   analyst of ecological patterns in fields and woodlots. For instance,
   one late manuscript, Faith in a Seed, suggests that he used
   experimentation and analysis to explain how forests regenerate after
   fire or human destruction, through dispersal by seed-bearing winds or
   animals.

   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 Darwin's theory of evolution. Although he was not a
   strict vegetarian, he ate relatively little meat and advocated
   vegetarianism as a means of self-improvement.

   Thoreau neither rejected civilization nor fully embraced wilderness.
   Instead he sought a middle ground, the pastoral realm that integrates
   both nature and culture. The wildness Thoreau enjoyed was the nearby
   swamp or forest. He preferred “partially cultivated country.” For
   Thoreau “far in the recesses of the wilderness” of Maine was to “travel
   the logger’s path and the Indian trail” rather than pristine untouched
   lands.

   Thoreau worked at his family’s pencil factory throughout most of his
   adult life. He had a natural gift for mechanics. According to Henry
   Petroski, Thoreau discovered how to make a good pencil out of inferior
   graphite by using clay as the binder; this invention improved upon
   graphite found in New Hampshire in 1821 by Charles Dunbar. Later,
   Thoreau converted the factory to producing plumbago (graphite), used to
   ink typesetting machines. Frequent contact with minute particles of
   graphite may have weakened his lungs.

   He traveled to Quebec once, Cape Cod four times, and Maine three times;
   these landscapes inspired his “excursion” essays, A Yankee in Canada,
   Cape Cod, and The Maine Woods, in which travel intineraries 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, visiting Niagara Falls, Detroit,
   Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul, and Mackinac Island.

Final Years: 1859-1862

   Thoreau family graves at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery
   Enlarge
   Thoreau family graves at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery

   Thoreau first contracted tuberculosis in 1835 and suffered from it
   sporadically over his life. In 1859, following a late night excursion
   to count the rings of tree stumps during a rain storm, he became ill
   with bronchitis. His health declined over three years with brief
   periods of remission, until he eventually became bedridden. Recognizing
   the terminal nature of his disease, Thoreau spent his last years
   revising and editing his unpublished works, particularly Excursions and
   The Maine Woods and petitioning publishers to print revised editions of
   A Week and Walden. He also wrote letters and Journal entries until he
   became too weak to continue. His friends were alarmed at his diminished
   appearance and 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 quite simply: “I did not know we had ever
   quarrelled.” He died on May 6, 1862 at the age of 44.

   Originally buried in the Dunbar family plot, he and members of his
   immediate family were eventually moved to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in
   Concord, Massachusetts. Emerson wrote the eulogy spoken at his funeral.
   Thoreau’s best friend Ellery Channing published his first biography,
   Thoreau the Poet-Naturalist, in 1873, and Channing and another friend
   Harrison Blake edited some poems, essays, and journal entries for
   posthumous publication in the 1890s. Thoreau’s Journal, often mined but
   largely unpublished at his death, appeared in 1906 and helped to build
   his modern reputation. A new and greatly expanded edition of the
   Journal is underway, published by Princeton University Press. Today,
   Thoreau is regarded as one of the foremost American writers, both for
   the modern clarity of his prose style and the prescience of his views
   on nature and politics. His memory is honored by the international
   Thoreau Society, the oldest and largest society devoted to an American
   author.

Harrison Blake

   Thoreau first received a letter from Harrison Blake, an ex-minister (
   Unitarian) widower of Worcester, Massachusetts, in March of 1848. Thus
   began a correspondence which lasted at least until May 3, 1861. Only
   Blake's first letter remains, but forty-nine of Thoreau's replies have
   been recovered. Harrison Blake, a year older than Thoreau, heard of
   Thoreau's experiment at Walden only six months after Thoreau had
   returned, but still six years before the book Walden was to be
   published. And while Thoreau was not yet widely recognized for his
   philosophical outlook, initiating a discourse with the author was
   strictly for that reason. Blake's first letter makes it clear that he
   seeks a spiritual mentor, and Thoreau's replies reveal that he was
   eager to fill the role. After the death of Sophia Thoreau, Harrison
   Blake inherited Thoreau's papers, and Blake was the first to publish
   extracts from the Journal.

Criticisms

   Thoreau was not without his critics. Scottish author Robert Louis
   Stevenson judged Thoreau’s endorsement of living alone in natural
   simplicity, apart from modern society, to be a mark of effeminacy:

     …Thoreau’s content and ecstasy in living was, we may say, like a
     plant that he had watered and tended with womanish solicitude; for
     there is apt to be something unmanly, something almost dastardly, in
     a life that does not move with dash and freedom, and that fears the
     bracing contact of the world. In one word, Thoreau was a skulker. He
     did not wish virtue to go out of him among his fellow-men, but slunk
     into a corner to hoard it for himself. He left all for the sake of
     certain virtuous self-indulgences.

   However, English novelist George Eliot, writing in 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.

   Throughout the 19th century, Thoreau was dismissed as a cranky
   provincial, hostile to material progress. In a later era, his devotion
   to the causes of abolition, Native Americans, and wilderness
   preservation have marked him as a visionary.

Influence

   A bust of Thoreau from the Hall of Fame for Great Americans at the
   Bronx Community College.
   Enlarge
   A bust of Thoreau from the Hall of Fame for Great Americans at the
   Bronx Community College.

   Thoreau’s writings had far reaching influences on many public figures.
   Political Leaders and reformers like Mahatma Gandhi, President John F.
   Kennedy, Civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr., Supreme Court
   Justice William O. Douglas, and Russian author Leo Tolstoy all spoke of
   being strongly affected by Thoreau’s work, particularly Civil
   Disobedience. So did many artists and authors including Edward Abbey,
   Willa Cather, Marcel Proust, William Butler Yeats, Sinclair Lewis,
   Ernest Hemingway, E. B. White and Frank Lloyd Wright and naturalists
   like John Burroughs, John Muir, Edwin Way Teale, Joseph Wood Krutch and
   David Brower. Anarchist and feminist Emma Goldman also appreciated
   Thoreau, and referred to him as “the greatest American anarchist”.

Thoreau's works

     * A Walk to Wachusett (1842)
     * A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849)
     * On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (1849)
     * Slavery in Massachusetts (1854)
     * Walden (1854)
     * A Plea for Captain John Brown (1860)
     * Excursions (1863)
     * Life Without Principle
     * The Maine Woods (1864)
     * Cape Cod (1865)
     * Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881)
     * Summer (1884)
     * Winter (1888)
     * Autumn (1892)
     * Miscellanies (1894)
     * Journal of Henry David Thoreau (1906)
     * Of Woodland Pools, Spring-holes & Ditches (2005)
     * Henry David Thoreau, et al., The Classics of Style. The American
       Academic Press, 2006.

Online texts

   1967 U.S. postage stamp honoring Thoreau
   Enlarge
   1967 U.S. postage stamp honoring Thoreau
     * Thoreau's Life & Writings (at the Thoreau Institute at Walden
       Woods)
     * Autumnal Tints - courtesy of Wikisource.
     * Cape Cod - The Thoreau Reader
     * On the Duty of Civil Disobedience - A well-footnoted version.
     * On the Duty of Civil Disobedience - courtesy of Wikisource.
     * The Highland Light - courtesy of Wikisource.
     * The Landlord - courtesy of Wikisource.
     * Life Without Principle - courtesy of Wikisource.
     * The Maine Woods - The Thoreau Reader
     * Night and Moonlight - courtesy of Wikisource.
     * A Plea for Captain John Brown
     * A Plea for Captain John Brown - an annotated version
     * Slavery in Massachusetts - The Thoreau Reader
     * Walden
     * Walden - The Thoreau Reader
     * Walking - courtesy of Wikisource.
     * Walking
     * A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
     * Wild Apples: The History of the Apple Tree
     * Works by Henry David Thoreau at Project Gutenberg
     * A Walk To Wachusett - The Walden Woods Project

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