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Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6,
1862; born David Henry Thoreau) was an American author, naturalist,
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.
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Life and work
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, 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.
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, 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. 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 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 an early 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 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."
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 postumous 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 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.
Quotes
Every creature is better alive than dead,
men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will
rather preserve its life than destroy it.
I heartily accept the motto, "That
government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it
acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally
amounts to this, which also I believe? "That government is best which
governs not at all"; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the
kind of government which they will have.
Love must be as much a light, as it is a
flame.
Why should we be in such desperate haste to
succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace
with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.
Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet
desperation.
A man is rich in proportion to the number
of things he can afford to let alone.
Any fool can make a rule, and every fool
will mind it.
As you simplify your life, the laws of the
universe will be simpler; solitude will not be solitude, poverty will
not be poverty, nor weakness weakness.
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.
The surliness with which the woodchopper
speaks of his woods, handling them as indifferently as his axe, is
better than the mealy-mouthed enthusiasm of the lover of nature.
Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself
out of much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for
something.
Bibliography
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
(1849)
Civil Disobedience (1849)
Slavery in Massachusetts (1854)
Walden (1854)
A Plea for Captain John Brown (1860)
Excursions (1863)
Life Without Principle
The Maine Woods (1864)
Cape Cod (1865)
Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881)
Summer (1884)
Winter (1888)
Autumn (1892)
Miscellanies (1894)
Journal of Henry David Thoreau (1906)
[edit]
Online texts
Autumnal Tints - courtesy of Wikisource.
Cape Cod - Thoreau Reader
On the Duty of Civil Disobedience
Civil Disobedience - courtesy of Wikisource.
The Highland Light - courtesy of Wikisource.
The Landlord - courtesy of Wikisource.
Life Without Principle - courtesy of
Wikisource.
The Maine Woods - Thoreau Reader
Night and Moonlight - courtesy of
Wikisource.
A Plea for Captain John Brown
Slavery in Massachusetts - Thoreau Reader
Walden
Walden - Thoreau Reader
Walking - courtesy of Wikisource.
Walking
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
Wild Apples: The History of the Apple Tree
Works by Henry David Thoreau at Project
Gutenberg
****
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