Background
Henry David Thoreau was born on July 12, 1817 in Concord, Massachussets, the third child of a feckless small businessman named John Thoreau and his bustling wife, Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau. His parents were permanently poor.
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Henry David Thoreau was born on July 12, 1817 in Concord, Massachussets, the third child of a feckless small businessman named John Thoreau and his bustling wife, Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau. His parents were permanently poor.
Henry studied at Harvard College between 1833 and 1837. He lived in Hollis Hall and took courses in rhetoric, classics, philosophy, mathematics, and science. According to legend, Thoreau refused to pay the five-dollar fee for a Harvard diploma. In fact, the master's degree he declined to purchase had no academic merit: Harvard College offered it to 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."
In 1837 Henry David Thoreau returned to Concord after his graduation from Harvard. Thoreau’s working life began with a teaching job at Concord Center School that lasted only a few weeks because he was unwilling to use corporal punishment on his students. In 1838 rebelling against the repressive educational system, he and his brother John founded their own academy, where they taught not only classical literature and languages, but also mathematics, physics, natural science, and natural philosophy. Thoreau preferred to teach by conversation.
Henry and his brother, John, ran their own school from 1838 to 1841. He had already begun to think of himself as a writer, however, and when he and John had to close their school in 1841 Thoreau accepted an offer to stay with neighboring Emerson's family and earn his keep as a handyman while he concentrated on his writing. Thoreau knew himself to be a writer from the time he graduated from Harvard. He had begun keeping a journal in 1837 and had probably started writing poetry earlier than that.
Thoreau’s writing career was launched in the year of 1840 when he began publishing essays and poems in Emerson and Margaret Fuller‘s new journal, The Dial, which became the home of much Transcendentalist writing. In July 1842 Thoreau published in The Dial “Natural History of Massachusetts,” which established the basic direction and style of his naturalistic writings. The essay displays both his scientific interest and his Transcendentalist vision of the meanings to be found in human encounters with nature. In two essays published in 1843, “A Winter Walk” and “A Walk to Wachusett,” Thoreau develops his naturalistic writing in the direction it later took in Walden. Thoreau worked off and on at his father’s pencil-making business, and in 1843 he served for a short time as tutor for Emerson’s brother Edward’s children on Staten Island, New York.
Then, in 1845, he built a small cabin near Walden Pond on land that Ralph Waldo Emerson had purchased to preserve its beauty. During his two-year stay at the pond Thoreau completed the manuscript for A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849); it was based on a trip he had taken with his brother, John, in 1839 and was intended as a memorial to John, who had died of tetanus in 1842. In 1856 Thoreau traveled to Perth Amboy, New Jersey, to survey a large estate and deliver three lectures. While there he visited Walt Whitman in nearby Brooklyn. In 1857 and 1858 he visited Cape Cod, the woods of Maine, and the White Mountains of New Hampshire; and in the latter year he published what was to become the second chapter of The Maine Woods, his essay "Chesuncook."
Thoreau taught himself to survey; he had, as Emerson noted in his eulogy, "a natural skill for mensuration," and he was very good at the work. In addition to working for the town of Concord, he surveyed house and wood lots around Concord for landowners who were having property assessed and those wanting to settle boundary disputes with their neighbors. In 1859, he was hired by a group of farmers who filed suit against the owners of the Billerica Dam, claiming that the dam raised the water level in the river and destroyed the farmers' meadow lands. To help support the claim, Thoreau collected evidence from many sources. He recorded his findings in a large chart and transferred appropriate information to an existing survey of the river that he had traced.
In 1860 Thoreau lectured to his townsmen on "The Succession of Forest Trees," and his lecture was shortly afterward published and republished, receiving wider circulation than any of Thoreau's other writings during his lifetime and cementing his reputation as a naturalist. He also collected specimens for Louis Agassiz, who had brought the study of natural history to Harvard after Thoreau graduated, but he was not compensated for this work. He lectured several times a year at lyceums and private homes from Maine to New Jersey. These lectures were important in his process of composition - most of the ideas and themes in his essays and books were first presented to the public in lectures - but they were not lucrative.
Thoreau's spells of illness increased during the 1850s. By December 1861 he no longer left his house; by the next spring he could hardly talk above a whisper. He died of consumption on May 6, 1862. In spite of the contentiousness of his life, his end was peaceful.
Henry David Thoreau is renowned for having lived the doctrines of Transcendentalism as recorded in his masterwork, Walden (1854), and for having been a vigorous advocate of civil liberties, as evidenced in the essay "Civil Disobedience" (1849). He is regarded as both a classic American writer and a cultural hero of his country. He established the tradition of nature writing later developed by the Americans John Burroughs and John Muir, and his pioneer study of the human uses of nature profoundly influenced such conservationists and regional planners as Benton MacKaye and Lewis Mumford.
Thoreau was a transcendentalist, who held views very much akin to pantheism.
Americans know Thoreau primarily as the author of Walden, but it is "Civil Disobedience" that established his reputation in the wider political world. It is one of the most influential political tracts ever written by an American.
Writing Walden was the high point of Thoreau's life and his main manifesto. Yet there were other important things that involved him. He devoted both his writing and his life increasingly to public issues. With word and deed he had fought against the Mexican-American war of the mid-1840s. And in the next decade he became totally involved in the struggle against slavery. In the 1840s he was still advising the abolitionists to free themselves before trying to free the slaves, but by the time he stood up for John Brown, he had become a confirmed abolitionist himself.
The connection between wildness and freedom is seen throughout Thoreau’s writing. To him, the good life required balancing the civilized and the wild, and his idea of nature informs his idea of liberty.
For Thoreau, the wild holds numerous individual and social benefits. It is a place where a person can discover and renew oneself. It is a place that allows for experimentation. It is a place that can bring radical regeneration or even a restructuring of society. Thoreau’s life in the Walden Woods, though he was somewhat isolated, was a kind of social experiment that he conducted on himself. Its goal was personal as well as social regeneration.
Thoreau’s views of wildness and freedom underlie his original and relevant libertarian philosophy. It is individualist and social. It is grounded in an understanding of nature and a desire to or figure out one’s place within it. Thoreau’s belief in acting on principles also gave him a practical attitude toward political violence and helped him make a persuasive case for peaceful revolution.
Quotations:
“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”
“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
“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. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms...”
“The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”
“Dreams are the touchstones of our characters.”
“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things..”
“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.”
“The animal merely makes a bed, which he warms with his body in a sheltered place; but man, having discovered fire, boxes up some air in a spacious apartment, and warms that, instead of robbing himself, makes that his bed, in which he can move about divested of more cumbrous clothing, maintain a kind of summer in the midst of winter, and by means of windows even admit the light and with a lamp lengthen out the day.”
He was a member of the Institute of 1770 (now the Hasty Pudding Club).
Thoreau loved nature and could stay indoors only with effort. The beautiful woods, meadows, and waters of the Concord neighborhood attracted him like a drug. He wandered among them by day and by night, observing the world of nature closely and sympathetically. He named himself, half humorously, "inspector of snow-storms and rainstorms. "
Thoreau was a hermit and stoic but he had a softer side which showed especially when he was with young people he liked. He was resourceful and ingenious; he had to be, to live the life he wanted. He was patient and tenacious, as a man had to be to get the most out of nature. He could have been a notable leader, given all those qualities, but Thoreau chose instead to be merely the captain of a huckleberry party.
Thoreau never married and was childless. He strove to portray himself as an ascetic puritan. However, his sexuality has long been the subject of speculation, including by his contemporaries. Critics have called him heterosexual, homosexual, or asexual. There is no evidence to suggest he had physical relations with anyone, man or woman. Some scholars have suggested that homoerotic sentiments run through his writings and concluded that he was homosexual.
Physical Characteristics: Thoreau had a distinctive appearance, with a nose that he called "my most prominent feature."
Quotes from others about the person
"His soul was made for the noblest society. " - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"His face, once seen, could not be forgotten. The features were quite marked: the nose aquiline or very Roman, like one of the portraits of Caesar (more like a beak, as was said); large overhanging brows above the deepest set blue eyes that could be seen, in certain lights, and in others gray, - eyes expressive of all shades of feeling, but never weak or near-sighted; the forehead not unusually broad or high, full of concentrated energy and purpose; the mouth with prominent lips, pursed up with meaning and thought when silent, and giving out when open with the most varied and unusual instructive sayings." - Ellery Channing
"Heard Thoreau's lecture before the Lyceum on the relation of the individual to the State - an admirable statement of the rights of the individual to self-government, and an attentive audience. His allusions to the Mexican War, to Mr. Hoar's expulsion from Carolina, his own imprisonment in Concord Jail for refusal to pay his tax, Mr. Hoar's payment of mine when taken to prison for a similar refusal, were all pertinent, well considered, and reasoned. I took great pleasure in this deed of Thoreau's." - Bronson Alcott, Journals
In 1839 Thoreau fell in love with and proposed marriage to an attractive visitor to Concord named Ellen Sewall. She accepted his proposal but then immediately broke off the engagement at the insistence of her parents.
He had a romance with Mary Russell, a young woman who stayed with the Emersons during the summers of 1840 and 1841. He wrote her a love poem in 1841 but never proposed, and she eventually married Marston Watson, a friend of Thoreau's from Harvard. He never married and had no children.
He operated a local pencil factory.
She rented out parts of the family's home to boarders.
May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882
Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century.
