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

David Henry Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, of John and Cynthia Thoreau. He was named after a recently deceased paternal Uncle, David Thoreau. He did not change his name to "Henry David" until he had graduated from Harvard, although he never petitioned the government to do so officially. He had two older siblings, Helen and John Jr., and a younger sister, Sophia. * Thoreau's birthplace still exists in a somewhat dilapidated state on Virginia Road in Concord. The house is original, but it was moved 50-100 yards away from the original site in the twentieth century.

Bronson Alcott notes in his journal that Thoreau pronounced his family name THOR-eau, accented on the first syllable, not the last as is common today. A Concord variant is THUR-eau, like the standard American pronunciation of the word "thorough." In appearance he was homely, with a nose that he called "my most prominent feature" (Cape Cod). Of his face, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote: "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." [http://eserver.org/thoreau/hawthornes.html

Thoreau studied at Harvard between 1833 and 1837, majoring in English. Legend states that Thoreau refused to pay the five-dollar fee for a Harvard diploma. In fact, the Masters' 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" (Thoreau's Diploma). His comment was Let every sheep keep its own skin.

Upon graduation, he returned home, where he became a companion of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson took a strong paternal, and sometimes patronizing liking to Thoreau, and delighted advising the young man and introducing him into his social circle, which consisted of some of the most important American writers and thinkers of the period including Ellery Channing, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, and Nathaniel Hawthorne and his son Julian who was just a boy at the time. Of the many esteemed authors who made their home at Concord, he was the only town native. Emerson referred to him as the man of Concord.

Emerson constantly pushed Thoreau to contribute essays and poems to the transcendentalist magazine, The Dial, but editor Margaret Fuller consented to publish Thoreau's work only after pressure from Emerson. His first work to garner any praise was Natural History of Massachusetts; half book review, half natural history essay, it was published in The Dial in 1842. Like most of his works, the essay was mostly made up of observations Thoreau had made in his journal. Thoreau had begun keeping a journal in 1837 at Emerson's suggestion. His first entry on October 22, 1837 reads, "'What are you doing now?' he * asked. 'Do you keep a journal?' So I make my first entry today."

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 advocated by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Bronson Alcott. Among their core beliefs was an ideal spiritual state that 'transcends' the physical and empirical and is only realized through the individual's intuition, rather than through the doctrines of established religions.

Thoreau had already taught school in Canton, Massachusetts as part of a program that allowed him to work during the school year at Harvard in 1835. After graduating in 1837, Thoreau secured a teaching position at The Concord Academy in Concord. His tenure was short-lived because he loathed the corporal punishment of students required by the school board.

Thoreau worked in his father's pencil workshop in 1837-1838. This workshop was in the basement of the Thoreau household on Main Street. He and his brother John opened a grammar school in Concord in 1838, teaching there until John became fatally ill in 1841.In 1841, he was invited into the Emerson household, where he lived sporadically until 1843 working as an all-around handyman, gardener, and assistant to Emerson. He spent a few months of 1843 in New York, serving as a tutor to William Emerson's sons, and attempting to break into the New York publishing industry with the help of his future literary representative Horace Greeley.[http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/thoreau.htm

The Walden Years: 1845-1847

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 tiny self-built house on land owned by Emerson. The house was not in wilderness but at the edge of town, 1.5 miles (2.4 km) from his family home. 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 because of his opposition to the Mexican-American War and slavery, for which he spent a night in jail. (Thoreau was freed the next day, over his loud protests, when his aunt paid his taxes.) His later essay on this experience, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, influenced Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

At Walden Pond he completed a first draft of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, an elegy to his brother John Thoreau Jr, who had died in 1842 of lock-jaw, describing their 1839 trip to the White Mountains. When the book failed to find a publisher, Emerson urged Thoreau to publish at his own expense. He did so with Munroe, Emerson's own publisher, who did little to publicize the book. Its failure put Thoreau into debt that took years to pay off, and Emerson's flawed advice caused a schism between the friends that never entirely healed.

In August of 1846, Thoreau briefly left Walden to make a trip to Mount Katahdin in Maine, a journey later recorded in "Ktaadn," the first part of The Maine Woods.

Thoreau left Walden Pond on September 6, 1847. Over several years he worked off his debts and also continuously revised his manuscript. In 1854 he published Walden, or Life in the Woods, recounting the two years, two months and two days he had 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, Walden at first won few admirers, but today critics regard it as a classic American book that explores natural simplicity, harmony, and beauty as models for just social and cultural conditions.

After Walden: 1850s

In 1851, Thoreau became increasingly fascinated with natural history (what we would now call science) and travel/expedition narratives. In 1851 he read avidly on the subject, particularly botany, and would often transcribe passages from the books he was reading into his journal. He greatly admired William Bartram, and Charles Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle. This interest increasingly became evident in his work and journals. He began a project of taking increasingly detailed observations of Concord, recording everything from the ways fruit would ripen over time, to the fluctuating depths of Walden Pond, to the days that certain birds would migrate. The point of his frustrating task was, in his words, to "anticipate" nature.

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 he kept for 24 years. His observations, far more objective than his previous journals, became so numerous that he began to take a separate natural history notebook for them.

These observations became the source for all of Thoreau's late natural history essays, such as Autumnal Tints, The Succession of Trees, and Wild Apples, an essay bemoaning the destruction of indigenous and wild apple species.

Until recently, Thoreau's scientific interests and pursuits were dismissed by critics as amateur and sloppy science coupled with a declined prose style. Only recently, with the 1993 publication of Faith in a Seed—a collection of not just his late natural history essays but also including the first publication of his unfinished manuscripts—has it become apparent that Thoreau had accomplished something important. In "Faith," he demonstrated by observation, experimentation and analysis, how 99 percent of forest seeds are dispersed; and how forests change over time, and regenerate after fire or human destruction.

Thoreau worked at his family's pencil factory in 1837-38, 1844, and 1849-50. He had a natural gift for mechanics. 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.

He traveled to Quebec once, Cape Cod twice, and Maine three times; these landscapes 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. Other travels took him southwest to Philadelphia and New York City in 1854, and west across the Great Lakes region in 1861, visiting Niagara Falls, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul, and Mackinac Island.

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 strict vegetarian, he ate relatively little meat and advocated vegetarianism as a means of self-improvement.

Thoreau on Nature

Thoreau's retreat to Walden is often seen as a rejection of civilization. However Thoreau neither rejected civilization nor did he fully embrace wilderness in the sense of pristine untouched land. Instead he sought a balance, appreciating both nature and civilization. The wildness Thoreau enjoyed was the nearby swamp. He preferred "partially cultivated country." He saw the wilderness of Maine as a place to visit to re-create but not to remain. Thoreau's concept of wilderness was a place used by man. For Thoreau "far in the recesses of the wilderness" of Maine was to "travel the logger's path and the Indian trail" rather then the pristine untouched wilderness we often associate with the word wilderness today.

Last years and death

Thoreau first contracted tuberculosis in 1835 and suffered from it sporadically over his life.* In 1859, following a late night excursion to count the rings of tree stumps during a rain storm, he became extremely ill. His health declined over three years with brief periods of remission, until he eventually became bedridden. Recognizing the terminal nature of his disease, Thoreau spent his last years editing, rewriting, and organizing his unpublished works, particularly The Dispersion of Seeds, and petitioning publishers to produce his essays and books. He also maintained correspondences and his journals until he became too weak, after which he would dictate to his sister. His friends' letters and journals are filled with both alarm at his diminished appearance and impending death, as well as fascination with Thoreau's tranquility with his situation. When a friend asked him in his last weeks whether he had made his peace with God, Thoreau responded quite simply: "We've never quarreled."

Thoreau died of tuberculosis in 1862 at age 44. Originally buried in the Dunbar family plot, he and members of his immediate family were eventually moved to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. Emerson wrote the eulogy spoken at his funeral. Thoreau's best friend Ellery Channing published his first biography, Thoreau the Poet-Naturalist, in 1873, and Channing and another friend Harrison Blake edited some poems, essays, and journal entries for posthumous publication in the 1890s. Thoreau's Journal, often mined but largely unpublished at his death, appeared in 1906 and helped to build his modern reputation. It is currently being reproduced in a multi-volume set. Today, Thoreau 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 memory is honored by the international Thoreau Society, the oldest and largest society devoted to an American author.

Criticisms

Thoreau was not without his critics. Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson judged Thoreau's endorsement of living alone in natural simplicity, apart from 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." Stevenson was sickly much of his life, bed-ridden and cared for by his mother and wife, but craved a life of adventure and travel. However, English novelist George Eliot, 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." Throughout the 19th century, Thoreau was dismissed as a cranky provincial, hostile to material progress. In a later era, his devotion to the causes of abolition, Native Americans, and wilderness preservation have marked him as a visionary.

Famous persons influenced

Thoreau's writings had far reaching influences on many public figures. Political Leaders and reformers like Mahatma Gandhi, President John F. Kennedy, Civil rights activist Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, and Russian author Leo Tolstoy all spoke of being strongly affected by Thoreau's work, particularly On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.So did many artists and authors including Edward Abbey, Willa Cather, Marcel Proust, William Butler Yeats, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, E. B. White and Frank Lloyd Wright and naturalists like John Burroughs, John Muir, Edwin Way Teale, Joseph Wood Krutch and David Brower.[http://www.kenkifer.com/Thoreau/ Anarchist and feminist Emma Goldman also appreciated Thoreau, and referred to him as "the greatest American anarchist".

Relationship with Harrison Blake

Thoreau received his first letter from Harrison Blake, an ex-minister (Unitarian) widower of Worcester, Massachusetts, in March of 1848. Thus began a correspondence which lasted at least until May 3, 1861. Only Blake's first letter remains, but forty-nine of Thoreau's replies have been recovered. Harrison Blake, a year older than Thoreau, heard of Thoreau's experiment at Walden only six months after Thoreau had returned, but still six years before the book Walden was to be published. And while Thoreau was not yet widely recognized for either his philosophical initiating a discourse with the author was strictly for that reason. Blake's first letter makes it clear that he seeks a spiritual mentor, and Thoreau's replies reveal that he was eager to fill the role.

Trivia

Thoreau's works

Online texts

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.
  • Dean, Bradley P. ed., Letters to a Spiritual Seeker. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004.
  • Harding, Walter. "The Days of Henry Thoreau". Princeton University Press, 1982.
  • Howarth, William. "The Book of Concord: Thoreau's Life as a Writer". Viking Press, 1982.
  • Meyer, Joel et al. The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau. Cambridge University Press. 1995.
  • Roderick Nash ''Henry David Thoreau, Philosopher'
  • Daniel Botkin No Man's Garden

See also

External links

1817 births | 1862 deaths | American abolitionists | American autodidacts | American environmentalists | American essayists | American naturalists | American pacifists | American philosophers | American tax resisters | American teetotalers | American travel writers | American Unitarians | Civil disobedience | Deaths by tuberculosis | Massachusetts writers | Nonviolence | Transcendentalism | Western mystics

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