Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau was born in 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts, a small town that he left only on brief excursions and that supplied him with most of his subject matter for the rest of his life. His father ran a pencil factory; Thoreau worked in it on and off and improved the manufacturing process. He went to Harvard, graduated in 1837 into the teeth of an economic panic, refused to flog his pupils when he taught school and resigned within two weeks, and spent the next quarter-century earning a precarious living as a surveyor, lecturer, and occasional pencil-maker while writing in the evenings.

He fell in early with Ralph Waldo Emerson, fourteen years his senior, who became patron, employer, and intellectual older brother. The Transcendentalist circle around Emerson — Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, the Dial magazine — gave Thoreau both a venue for his early work and a vocabulary (self-reliance, the moral authority of nature) that he would push much further than Emerson ever did. In 1845 he borrowed an axe, walked out to a patch of woods on the shore of Walden Pond — land owned by Emerson — and built himself a one-room cabin for about twenty-eight dollars. He lived there for two years and two months, growing beans, reading the Bhagavad Gita, taking notes, and walking back into town often enough that the cabin was never the experiment in absolute solitude that legend has made it. His mother and sisters did his laundry. He ate dinner at the Emersons'. Concord was a twenty-minute walk away.

The two books that survive are A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), a memorial to his brother John, who had died of tetanus in 1842, and Walden (1854), the prose record of the cabin years, revised over nearly a decade. Walden is many books at once — a manual of economy, a polemic against industrial labor and consumer debt, a calendar of the seasons at the pond, a sustained essay on what a human being actually needs to be alive. It sold slowly during his lifetime and became canonical only later.

In July 1846 Thoreau spent a night in the Concord jail for refusing, on principle, to pay a poll tax that helped fund the Mexican War and the institution of slavery. Someone — probably an aunt — paid it for him the next morning over his objections. From that night came the 1849 essay published as "Resistance to Civil Government," later retitled "Civil Disobedience," in which Thoreau argued that the citizen's first obligation is to conscience and that an unjust law deserves not reform but disobedience. The essay reached Tolstoy in Russia, Gandhi in South Africa, and Martin Luther King Jr. in Montgomery; it is a founding document of nonviolent resistance as a modern political tactic.

He died of tuberculosis in 1862 at forty-four, attended by his sister Sophia, who reported his last clear words as "moose" and "Indian." His later journals — vast, meticulous, attentive to phenology and Indigenous Massachusett vocabulary — were published posthumously and remain one of the great records of sustained attention to a single landscape in the English language.