Henry
David Thoreau
Portrait of Henry David Thoreau
Portrait of Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), 1847. Private Collection. Heritage Images / Getty Images
American
Essayist
Portrait
of American Author, Poet, and Naturalist Henry David Thoreau.
By Lily
Rockefeller
Updated
on November 29, 2019
Henry
David Thoreau (July 12, 1817-May 6, 1862) was an American essayist,
philosopher, and poet. Thoreau’s writing is heavily influenced by his own life,
in particular his time living at Walden Pond. He has a lasting and celebrated
reputation for embracing non-conformity, the virtues of a life lived for
leisure and contemplation, and the dignity of the individual.
Fast
Facts: Henry David Thoreau
Known
For: His involvement in transcendentalism and his book Walden
Born:
July 12, 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts
Parents:
John Thoreau and Cynthia Dunbar
Died: May
6, 1862 in Concord, Massachusetts
Education:
Harvard College
Selected
Published Works: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), “Civil
Disobedience” (1849), Walden (1854), “Slavery in Massachusetts” (1854),
“Walking" (1864)
Notable
Quote: “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.” (From
Walden)
Early
Life and Education (1817-1838)
Henry
David Thoreau was born on July 12, 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts, the son of
John Thoreau and his wife, Cynthia Dunbar. The New England family was modest:
Thoreau’s father was involved with the Concord fire department and ran a pencil
factory, while his mother rented out parts of their house to boarders and cared
for the children. Actually named David Henry at birth in honor of his late
uncle David Thoreau, he was always known as Henry, although he never had his
name changed officially. The third of four children, Thoreau spent a peaceful
childhood in Concord, celebrating especially the natural beauty of the village.
When he was 11, his parents sent him to Concord Academy, where he did so well that
he was encouraged to apply to college.
In 1833,
when he was 16 years old, Thoreau began his studies at Harvard College,
following in the steps of his grandfather. His older siblings, Helen and John
Jr., helped pay his tuition from their salaries. He was a strong student, but
was ambivalent to the college’s ranking system, preferring to pursue his own
projects and interests. This independent spirit also saw him taking a brief
absence from the college in 1835 to teach at a school in Canton, Massachusetts,
and was an attribute that would define the rest of his life.
Early
Career Changes (1835-1838)
When he
graduated in 1837 in the middle of his class, Thoreau was uncertain what to do
next. Uninterested in a career in medicine, law, or ministry, as was common for
educated men, Thoreau decided to continue working in education. He secured a
place at a school in Concord, but he found he could not administer corporal
punishment. After two weeks, he quit.
Thoreau
went to work for his father’s pencil factory for a short time. In June of 1838
he set up a school with his brother John, though when John became ill just
three years later, they shut it down. In 1838, however, he and John took a
life-changing canoe trip along the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and Thoreau
began considering a career as a poet of nature.
Friendship
With Emerson (1839-1844)
In 1837,
when Thoreau was a sophomore at Harvard, Ralph Waldo Emerson settled in
Concord. Thoreau had already encountered Emerson’s writing in the book Nature.
By autumn that year, the two kindred spirits had become friends, brought
together by similar outlooks: both trusted staunchly in self-reliance, the
dignity of the individual, and the metaphysical power of nature. Although they
would have a somewhat tumultuous relationship, Thoreau ultimately found both a
father and a friend in Emerson. It was Emerson who asked his protégé if he kept
a journal (a lifelong habit of the older poet’s), prompting Thoreau to begin
his own journal in late 1837, a habit which he, too, maintained for almost his
entire life up until two months before his death. The journal spans thousands
of pages, and many of Thoreau’s writings were originally developed from notes
in this journal.
THOREAU'S
JOURNAL
Thoreau's journal. Reproduced from a
photograph of the actual volume. Public
Domain
In 1840,
Thoreau met and fell in love with a young woman visiting Concord by the name of
Ellen Sewall. Although she accepted his proposal, her parents objected to the
match and she immediately broke off the engagement. Thoreau would never make a
proposal again and never married.
Thoreau
moved in with the Emersons for a time in 1841. Emerson encouraged the young man
to pursue his literary leanings, and Thoreau embraced the profession of poet,
producing many poems as well as essays. While living with the Emersons, Thoreau
served as a tutor for the children, a repairman, a gardener, and ultimately an
editor of Emerson’s works. In 1840, Emerson’s literary group, the
transcendentalists, began the literary journal The Dial. The first issue
published Thoreau’s poem “Sympathy” and his essay “Aulus Persius Flaccus,” on
the Roman poet, and Thoreau continued contributing his poetry and prose to the
magazine, including in 1842 with the first of his many nature essays, “Natural
History of Massachusetts.” He continued publishing with The Dial until its
shuttering in 1844 due to financial troubles.
Thoreau
became restless while living with the Emersons. In 1842 his brother John had
died a traumatic death in Thoreau’s arms, having contracted tetanus from
cutting his finger while shaving, and Thoreau was struggling with the grief.
Ultimately, Thoreau decided to move to New York, living with Emerson’s brother
William on Staten Island, tutoring his children, and attempting to make
connections among the New York literary market. Although he felt he was unsuccessful
and he despised city life, it was in New York that Thoreau met Horace Greeley,
who was to become his literary agent and a promoter of his work. He left New
York in 1843 and returned to Concord. He worked partly at his father’s
business, making pencils and working with graphite.
Within
two years he felt he needed another change, and wanted to finish the book he
had begun, inspired by his river canoe trip in 1838. Taken by the idea of a
Harvard classmate, who had once built a hut by the water in which to read and
think, Thoreau decided to take part in a similar experiment.
Walden
Pond (1845-1847)
Emerson
bequeathed to him the land he owned by Walden Pond, a small lake two miles
south of Concord. In early 1845, at the age of 27, Thoreau started chopping
down trees and building himself a small cabin on the shores of the lake. On
July 4, 1845, he officially moved into the house in which he would live for two
years, two months, and two days, officially beginning his famous experiment.
These were to be some of the most satisfying years of Thoreau’s life.
Thoreau's
Cabin at Walden Pond
Recreation of Thoreau's Cabin at Walden Pond in Massachusetts. Nick Pedersen / Getty
Images
His
lifestyle at Walden was ascetic, informed by his desire to live a life as basic
and self-sufficient as possible. While he would often walk into Concord, two
miles away, and ate with his family once a week, Thoreau spent almost every
night in his cottage on the banks of the lake. His diet consisted mostly of the
food he found growing wild in the general area, although he also planted and
harvested his own beans. Remaining active with gardening, fishing, rowing, and
swimming, Thoreau also spent lots of time documenting the local flora and
fauna. When he was not busy with the cultivation of his food, Thoreau turned to
his inner cultivation, mainly through meditation. Most significantly, Thoreau
spent his time in contemplation, reading and writing. His writing focused
mainly on the book he had already begun, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack
Rivers (1849), which chronicled the trip he spent canoeing with his older
brother that ultimately inspired him to be become a poet of nature.
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Thoreau
also maintained a fastidious journal of this time of simplicity and satisfying
contemplation. He was to return to his experience on the shore of that lake in
just a few years to write the literary classic known as Walden (1854), arguably
Thoreau’s greatest work.
After
Walden and “Civil Disobedience” (1847-1850)
A Week on
the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849)
"Civil
Disobedience" (1849)
In the
summer of 1847, Emerson decided to travel to Europe, and invited Thoreau to
reside once more at his house and continue tutoring the children. Thoreau,
having completed his experiment and finished his book, lived at Emerson’s for
two more years and continued his writing. Because he could not find a publisher
for A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Thoreau published it at his own
expense, and made little money off of its meager success.
Interior
Room with Henry David Thoreau's Furniture
During
this time Thoreau also published "Civil Disobedience." Halfway
through his time at Walden in 1846, Thoreau had been met by the local tax
collector, Sam Staples, who had asked him to pay the poll tax that he had
ignored for multiple years. Thoreau refused on the basis that he would not pay
his taxes to a government which supported enslavement and which was waging the
war against Mexico (which lasted from 1846-1848). Staples put Thoreau in jail,
until the next morning when an unidentified woman, perhaps Thoreau’s aunt, paid
the tax and Thoreau—reluctantly—went free. Thoreau defended his actions in an
essay published in 1849 under the name “Resistance to Civil Government” and now
known as his famous “Civil Disobedience.” In the essay, Thoreau defends
individual conscience against the law of the masses. He explains that there is
a higher law than civil law, and just because the majority believes something
to be right does not make it so. It follows then, he explained, that when an
individual intuits a higher law to which civil law does not accord, he must
still follow the higher law—no matter what the civil consequences be, in his
case, even spending time in jail. As he writes: “Under a government which
imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.”
“Civil
Disobedience” is one of Thoreau’s most lasting and influential works. It has
inspired many leaders to begin their own protests, and has been particularly
persuasive to non-violent protesters, including such figures as Martin Luther
King Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi.
Later
Years: Nature Writing and Abolitionism (1850-1860)
"Slavery
in Massachusetts" (1854)
Walden
(1854)
Ultimately,
Thoreau moved back into his family home in Concord, working occasionally at his
father’s pencil factory as well as a surveyor to support himself while
composing multiple drafts of Walden and finally publishing it in 1854. After
his father’s death, Thoreau took over the pencil factory.
Title
Page From Walden
The title page from the first edition of Henry
David Thoreau's Walden: or, Life in the Woods. Thoreau wrote of his experiences
and thoughts during a two-year period when he lived in a tiny one-room cabin he
had built by the shore of Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts. Library of
Congress / Getty Images
By the
1850s, Thoreau was less interested in transcendentalism, as the movement was
already splitting apart. He continued, however, to explore his ideas about
nature, traveling to the Maine Woods, Cape Cod, and to Canada. These adventures
found their places in articles, “Ktaadn, and the Maine Woods,” (1848), which
was later to make up the beginning of his book The Maine Woods (published posthumously
in 1864), “Excursion to Canada” (1853), and “Cape Cod” (1855).
With such
works, Thoreau is now seen as one of the founders of the genre of American
nature writing. Also published posthumously (in Excursions, 1863) is the
lecture he developed from 1851 to 1860 and which was ultimately known as the
essay "Walking" (1864), in which he outlined his thinking on
mankind's relationship to nature and the spiritual importance of leaving
society for a time. Thoreau thought of the piece as one of his seminal pieces
and it is one of the definitive works of the transcendental movement.
In
response to growing national unrest regarding the abolition of enslavement,
Thoreau found himself adopting a more stringently abolitionist stance. In 1854
he delivered a scathing lecture called “Slavery in Massachusetts,” in which he
indicted the whole country for the evils of enslavement, even the free states
where enslavement was outlawed—including, as the title suggested, his own
Massachusetts. This essay is one of his most celebrated achievements, with an
argument both stirring and elegant.
Illness
and Death (1860-1862)
Thorau bust
Thoreau gravest
In 1835,
Thoreau contracted tuberculosis and suffered from it periodically over the
course of his life. In 1860 he caught bronchitis and from then on his health
began to decline. Aware of his impending death, Thoreau showed remarkable
tranquility, revising his unpublished works (including The Maine Woods and
Excursions) and concluding his journal. He died in 1862, at the age of 44, of
tuberculosis. His funeral was planned and attended by the Concord literary set,
including Amos Bronson Alcott and William Ellery Channing; his old and great
friend Emerson delivered his eulogy.
Henry
David Thoreau stamp
Stamp printed by United states, shows Henry
David Thoreau, circa 1967. rook76 / Getty Images
Legacy
Thoreau
did not see the huge successes in his lifetime that Emerson saw in his. If he
was known, it was as a naturalist, not as a political or philosophical thinker.
He only published two books in his lifetime, and he had to publish A Week on
the Concord and Merrimack Rivers himself, while Walden was hardly a bestseller.
Thoreau
is now, however, known as one of the greatest American writers. His thinking
has exerted a massive worldwide influence, in particular on the leaders of
non-violent liberation movements such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.,
both of whom cited "Civil Disobedience" as a major influence on them.
Like Emerson, Thoreau's work in transcendentalism responded to and reaffirmed
an American cultural identity of individualism and hard work that is still
recognizable today. Thoreau's philosophy of nature is one of the touchstones of
the American nature-writing tradition. But his legacy is not only literary,
academic, or political, but also personal and individual: Thoreau is a cultural
hero for the way he lived his life as a work of art, championing his ideals
down to the most everyday of choices, whether it be in solitude on the banks of
Walden or in behind the bars of the Concord jail.
Sources
Furtak,
Rick Anthony, "Henry David Thoreau", The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy (Fall 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.),
https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2019/entries/thoreau/.
Harding,
Walter. The Days of Henry David Thoreau. Princeton University Press, 2016.
Packer,
Barbara. The Transcendentalists. University of Georgia Press, 2007.
Thoreau,
Henry David. Walden. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg, 1995. Retrieved
November 21, 2019 from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/205/205-h/205-h.htm.
With
affection,
Ruben
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