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Henry David Thoreau Biography
born: July 12, 1817
died: May 6, 1862
Henry David Thoreau was an American author, pacifist, tax
resister and philosopher who is famous for his auto-biographical
work Walden on living simply amongst nature and also Civil Disobedience concerning resistance to civil government. He was a lifelong
abolitionist, delivering lectures that attacked the Fugitive
Slave Law.
His most lasting contributions were in extensive writings
on natural history and philosophy, where he anticipated the
methods and findings of ecology and environmental history,
two sources of modern environmentalism.
He was born in Concord, Massachusetts, and graduated from
Harvard in 1837. There are legends stating Thoreau did not
want to pay the five dollar fee required from Harvard College
to receive a college diploma or a "sheet of paper;" therefore,
he never received it. In fact, the degree had no academic
merit: Harvard College offered a master of arts degree to
anyone of its 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)
Thoreau was a philosopher of nature and its relation to the
human condition. In his early years, he accepted the ideas
of Transcendentalism, an eclectic philosophy that included
among its advocates Ralph Waldo Emerson.
After college, Thoreau taught school, wrote essays and poems
for The Dial, and briefly attempted freelance writing
in New York City. The death of his brother in 1842 was a profound
emotional shock and may have influenced his decision to live
with his parents and never to marry.
Thoreau embarked on a two-year experiment in simple living
on July 4, 1845 when he moved to a second-growth forest around
the shores of beautiful Walden Pond, as a guest of his friend
Ralph Waldo Emerson. It was a fifteen minute walk from his
family in Concord, Massachusetts. On a trip into town, he
ran into the local tax collector who asked him to pay six
years of delinquent poll taxes (1846). Thoreau refused, purportedly
for his opposition to the Mexican-American War, (1846-1848),
for which he spent a night in jail. His later essay on this
experience, Civil Disobedience, influenced Leo Tolstoy,
Mohandas Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr..
Thoreau left Walden Pond on September 6, 1847.
Published in 1854, Walden,
or Life in the Woods, recounts the two years and
two months Thoreau 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, this American classic emerged from a
nine year process of composition and revision, the lengthy
period in part because his previous work, A Week on the
Concord and Merrimack Rivers, had been so poorly received.
At various times, Thoreau earned a living by lecturing or
working at his family's pencil factory. He invented a machine
that simplified production while cutting costs. Later he converted
the factory to producing plumbago, used to ink typesetting
machines. Frequent contact with minute particles of lead may
have weakened his lungs.
After 1850 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 that he kept for 24 years. He also traveled
to Canada, Cape Cod, and Maine, landscapes that inspired his
"excursion" books, A Yankee in Canada, Cape Cod, and The Maine
Woods, in which travel intineraries frame his thoughts about
geography, history, and philosophy.
Hailed as the first European-American environmentalist, Thoreau
wrote essays on autumnal foliage, the succession of forest
trees, and the disperal of seeds, collected in Excursions.
Scientists regard these works as anticipating ecology, the
study of interactions between species, places, and seasons.
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 Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.
Although he was not a vegetarian, he ate relatively little
meat and advocated vegetarianism as a means of self-improvement.
Thoreau was not without his critics. Scottish author Robert
Louis Stevenson for one judged Thoreau's endorsement of natural
simplicity over the tangles of 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." English novelist
George Eliot, however, 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."
he wrote in the Westminster Review.
Thoreau died of tuberculosis in 1862, in the town of his birth,
Concord, and was buried at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. His friend
Emerson edited his letters and arranged for them to be published
posthumously in 1895. Thoreau's collection of journals, the
publication for which Thoreau had prepared during the last
years of his life, having become aware of his illness, appeared
in 1906. Today he is regarded as a foremost American writer,
both for the modern clarity of his prose style and the prescience
of his views on nature and politics. His popularity is evidenced
in part by the international Thoreau Society, which is the
oldest and largest society devoted to an American author.
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