HENRY DAVID THOREAU

(1817-1862)

The pattern of his life had been, and would continue to be, precisely the opposite of the great American success story of the self-made man. If ever a person looked like a self-unmade man, a man who had squandered the advantages of intelligence, education, and the friendship of brilliant and successful people, it was Henry David Thoreau. On top of all his other problems, Thoreau was difficult to get along with. He was admired, but from a distance—for he kept people at a distance.

David Henry Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1817. (He changed the order of his names after graduating from college.) His father was a moderately successful manufacturer of pencils. His mother took in boarders among them the sister of Emerson's wife, thus establishing the relationship between the two families. As a boy, Thoreau tramped the woods and fields around Concord, often with a fishing rod, seldom with a gun. No one knew Concord as well as he did, and his attachment to this region was established early in his life.

Thoreau entered Harvard in 1833 and graduated four years later (without any literary distinction). Independent and eccentric even then, he attended chapel in a green coat, "because," he wrote, "the rules required black." He never ranked higher than the middle of his class, but he was extremely well read. At Harvard, mostly on his own, he became thoroughly familiar with English literature and with the German philosophers who provided much of the underpinnings of Transcendentalism.

After graduation, Thoreau went to New York. After a year of struggling, he gave up and came home. A friend proposed that Henry and he sail to Europe and work their way across the continent, but Henry turned him down. In 1845 he built a cabin in the woods on a shore of Walden Pond and lived there for more than two years. He described his experience in the novel “Walden or life in the wood” (1854).

The experiment at Walden Pond was an attempt to rediscover the grandeur and heroism inherent in a simple life led close to Nature. "I wish to meet the facts of life," he wrote in his journal, "the vital facts, which are the phenomena or actuality the gods meant to show us... and so I came down here."

Walden —one of the greatest works ever produced in America—owes much of its artistic success to Thoreau's successful blending of style and content. He looked to Nature, rather than to the stylists of the past, for a model. His style would be simple—at least on the surface. "Nature never indulges in exclamations," he wrote, "never says ah! or alas! She is not French. She is a plain writer, uses few gestures, does not add to her verbs, uses few adverbs, no expletives." His novel is a detailed record of the writer’s life in the wood, his philosophical meditations, his observations of himself and the surrounding nature. His transcentalism was empirical, not theoretical. He defended the dignity and the rights of those who created the material wealth of the society.

As a protest against the Mexican War, which he and many others saw as an attempt to extend American slave-owning territory, Thoreau refused to pay his poll tax. He then spent a night in jail before someone paid the tax for him. Thoreau was vocally and radically opposed to slavery. While at Walden, and again in 1851 (after the Fugitive Slave Act had been passed), he helped fugitive slaves make their way to Canada. Near the end of his life, in 1859, he was one of the first defenders of John Brown, the radical abolitionist who staged a famous raid on the Federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry in Virginia.

Thoreau remained at Walden for a little more than two years. In 1847, he left the cabin and moved back into the Emerson’s' house, where he had received room and board before, in exchange for a few hours a day of odd jobs and gardening. During the next few years, he worked on Walden and "Resistance to Civil Government," which was delivered as a lecture in 1848 and published in 1849. Later called "Civil Disobedience," this essay asserted the primacy of the individual conscience and the need for action in keeping with that conscience. It had little immediate influence, but few essays have had such an overwhelming, long-range effect on human history. It was especially important in helping to inspire the form of passive resistance used by Mahatma Gandhi in India and, later, by Martin Luther King, Jr., in the United States.

Thoreau moved back into his father's house in 1849 and lived there the rest of his life. He supported himself by making pencils, taking odd jobs—he was an excellent carpenter, and gardener—and doing survey work on the land around Concord that he knew so well. He became a kind of Concord record-keeper, a fount of local knowledge about the amount of rainfall and snowfall and the first days of frost. He could predict to the day when each wildflower in the area would bloom.

His most widely read works, though, were his antislavery tract, "Slavery in Massachusetts," and "A Plea for Captain John Brown" (1860).

In 1861, Thoreau caught a cold, and it soon became clear that beneath the cold lay incurable tuberculosis. He traveled that year to the Midwest in hopes that the change of air would help, but it did not. When he returned to Concord, he began working feverishly to put his work in final shape. He faced his coming death with great calm.

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