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Henry David Thoreau

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Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862; born David Henry Thoreau) was an American author, naturalist, transcendentalist, pacifist, tax resister and philosopher who is famous for Walden (available at wikisource), on simple living amongst nature, and Civil Disobedience (available at wikisource), on resistance to civil government. He was a lifelong abolitionist, delivering lectures that attacked the Fugitive Slave Law while praising the writings of Wendell Phillips and defending the radical 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.

Life and work

He was born in Concord, Massachusetts, and studied at Harvard between 1833 and 1837, majoring in English. Today, an equivalent degree would be in comparative literature. There are legends stating Thoreau did not want to pay the five dollar fee required to graduate from Harvard College to receive a college diploma; therefore, he never received his diploma. In fact, the Masters' degree document which he declined to purchase 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) His comment was Let every sheep keep its own skin.

Of all the esteemed figures of American literature who made their home at Concord, he was the only native of the town. His many close acquaintances included Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, and Nathaniel and Julian Hawthorne (at that time only a boy). When Margaret Fuller and her family died in a tragic shipwreck, it was Thoreau who went to Fire Island to search for remains, an account of which is given in his essay entitled Cape Cod.

Thoreau's ugliness was noted upon in the journals of almost all of his friends. 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." (American Notebooks, September 1, 1842)

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 [idealist] philosophy that included among its advocates Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Bronson Alcott.

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.

File:Henry David Thoreau circa 1879.jpg
Henry David Thoreau, photograph published circa 1879.

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 and lived in a cabin which he built on Ralph Waldo Emerson's land, 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, and slavery, 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, which he had published and financed at Emerson's insistence, had been so poorly received. Emerson had directed him to his own Publisher, Mr. Munroe, who did little to publicize the book. Its failure put Thoreau into debt which took him years to pay off, and Emerson's flawed advice is largely credited as causing a schism to form between the two friends, which never entirely healed. "A Week," which Thoreau wrote during his stay at Walden Pond, was meant to be a eulogy to his dead brother John Thoreau Jr, and told the story of the two week hiking-rafting trip the two took together.

At various times, Thoreau earned a living by lecturing or working at his family's pencil factory. 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, used to ink typesetting machines. Frequent contact with minute particles of graphite 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 Quebec once, Cape Cod twice, and Maine three times, landscapes that 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. He began writing the Journal at Emerson's suggestion. His first entry was on October 22, 1837. He wrote: "'What are you doing now?' he [Emerson] asked. 'Do you keep a journal?' So I make my first entry today."

Hailed as an early American environmentalist, Thoreau wrote essays on autumnal foliage, the succession of forest trees, and the dispersal 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 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 was one example, who 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, 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." During his life, and for the rest of the 19th century, Thoreau was marginalized as a provincial, uninteresting writer. To this day he has yet to completely shake the early accusation of having "stolen from the orchards of Emerson."

Thoreau family graves at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery

Thoreau died of tuberculosis in 1862, in the town of his birth, Concord, and was buried at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. His friends, Ellery Channing and Harrison Blake, edited some poems, essays, and Journal entries for posthumous publication in the 1890s. Thoreau's two-million-word Journal, often mined but largely unpublished at his death, appeared in 1906 and helped to build his modern reputation. Today he 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 popularity is evidenced in part by the international Thoreau Society, which is the oldest and largest society devoted to an American author.

Bibliography

Online texts

1967 U.S. postage stamp honoring Thoreau

References

  • Petroski, Henry. H. D. Thoreau, Engineer. American Heritage of Invention and Technology, Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 8-16.
  • Bode, Carl. Best of Thoreau's Journals.. Southern Illinois University Press. 1967.
  • Dassow Walls, Laura. Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and 19th Century Science. University of Wisconsin Press. 1995.
  • ed. Meyer, Joel et al. The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau. Cambridge University Press. 1995.

See also

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Henry David Thoreau
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