Henry David Thoreau was born in
Concord, Massachusetts on July 12, 1817,
the third child of John Thoreau and Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau. The
freethinking Thoreaus were relatively cultured, but they were also poor,
making their living by the modest production of homemade pencils.
Despite financial constraints, Henry received a top-notch education,
first at Concord Academy and then at Harvard College in nearby Cambridge,
Massachusetts. His education there included ancient and modern European
languages and literatures, philosophy, theology, and history. Graduating
from Harvard in 1837, Thoreau returned to
Concord to teach in the local grammar school, but resigned abruptly
in only his second week on the job, declaring himself unable to
inflict corporal punishment on misbehaving pupils. In the ensuing
months, Thoreau sought another teaching job unsuccessfully. It was
around this time that Thoreau met Ralph Waldo Emerson, a prominent
American philosopher, essayist, and poet who had recently moved
to Concord. The friendship between the two would eventually prove
the most influential of Thoreau’s life. The following June, Thoreau
founded a small progressive school emphasizing intellectual curiosity
over rote memorization, and after a period of success for the school,
his brother John joined the venture. After several years, John’s
failing health and Henry’s impatience for larger projects made it
impossible to continue running the school.
During this period, Thoreau assisted his family in pencil
manufacturing, and worked for a time as a town surveyor. He also
began to keep an extensive journal, to which he would devote considerable energy
over the next twenty-five years. His writing activities deepened
as his friendship with Emerson developed and as he was exposed to
the Transcendentalist movement, of which Emerson was the figurehead.
Transcendentalism drew heavily on the idealist and otherworldly
aspects of English and German Romanticism, Hindu and Buddhist thought,
and the tenets of Confucius and Mencius. It emphasized the individual
heart, mind, and soul as the center of the universe and made objective
facts secondary to personal truth. It construed self-reliance, as
expounded in Emerson’s famous 1841 essay
by that same title, not just as an economic virtue but also as a whole
philosophical and spiritual basis for existence. And, importantly
for Thoreau, it sanctioned a disavowal or rejection of any social
norms, traditions, or values that contradict one’s own -personal
vision.
With his unorthodox manners and irreverent views, Thoreau quickly
made a name for himself among Emerson’s followers, who encouraged
him to publish essays in The Dial, an emerging
Transcendentalist magazine established by Margaret Fuller. Among these
early works were the first of Thoreau’s nature writings, along with
a number of poems and a handful of book reviews. Thoreau began to
enjoy modest success as a writer. His personal life was marred by
his rejected marriage proposal to Ellen Sewall in 1840, who
was forced to turn down Thoreau (as she had turned down his brother,
John, before him) because of pressure from her family, who considered
the Thoreaus to be financially unstable and suspiciously radical.
Disappointed in love, devastated by the 1842 death
of his brother, and unable to secure literary work in New York,
Thoreau was soon back in Concord, once again pressed into service
in the family pencil business.
During the early 1840s, Thoreau
lived as a pensioner at the Emerson address, where he helped maintain
the house and garden, and provided companionship to Emerson’s second
wife, Lidian. Thoreau and Lidian developed an intimate, but wholly
platonic friendship. It was on Emerson’s land at Walden Pond that
Thoreau, inspired by the experiment of his Harvard classmate, Charles Stearns
Wheeler, erected a small dwelling in which to live closer to nature.
On July 4, 1845, his
cabin complete, Thoreau moved to the woods by Walden Pond. He spent
the next two years there composing the initial drafts to the two
works on which his later reputation would largely rest: A
Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, first published
in 1849, and Walden; or, Life in
the Woods, first published in 1854.
Thoreau’s isolation during this period is sometimes exaggerated.
He lived within easy walking distance of Concord, and received frequent
visitors in his shack, most often his close friend and traveling
companion William Ellery Channing.
During a journey Thoreau made to Concord in July of 1846,
the constable apprehended and imprisoned him for nonpayment of a poll
tax that he refused to pay because it supported a nation endorsing
slavery. In the mild scandal aroused by this gesture against authority,
Thoreau defended his actions in a lecture to the Concord Lyceum,
in which he publicly expounded his reasons for resisting state authority.
Later he revised and published this lecture under the title “Civil
Disobedience,” which is the most internationally known of Thoreau’s
works, inspiring such prominent social thinkers as Leo Tolstoy and
Mahatma Gandhi.
When Emerson went to Europe for an extended stay in the autumn
of 1847, Thoreau left Walden to keep house
with Lidian again for nearly two years. After Emerson’s return,
tensions between the two men caused a rift in their friendship.
Thoreau left the Emerson residence and returned to his family home,
where he would remain for the rest of his life, and resumed work
in the pencil business. As the slavery debate came to a head in
the 1850s, Thoreau took on a vocal role in
the burgeoning abolitionist movement. He assisted fugitive slaves
on the Underground Railroad, and later took an unpopular stand by
announcing his support for the martyred John Brown, who in 1859 had
sought to incite a slave rebellion in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia.
But during a protracted bout of tuberculosis in the late 1850s,
Thoreau largely retreated from public concerns. He began a study
of growth rings in forest trees, and visited Minnesota on a walking
tour in the spring of 1861. But his illness finally
overcame him, and he died at home in Concord on May 6, 1862,
at the age of forty-four.
Although Thoreau is held today in great esteem, his work received
far less attention during his lifetime, and a considerable number
of his neighbors viewed him with contempt. As a result, Thoreau
had to self-finance the publication of his first book, A
Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Published in
an edition of 1,000,
over 700 of these copies remained unsold,
and he eventually stored them on his home bookshelves; Thoreau liked
to joke that he had written an entire library. Even Walden was
met with scant interest. He revised the work eight times before
a publisher accepted it, and the book found only marginal success
during Thoreau’s lifetime. It was not until the twentieth century
that Thoreau’s extraordinary impact on American culture would be
felt. In the upsurge in counterculture sentiment during the Vietnam
War and the Civil Rights era, Walden and “Civil
Disobedience” inspired many young Americans to express their disavowal
of official U.S. policies and declare ideological independence,
even at the risk of arrest. Walden also expressed
a critique of consumerism and capitalism that was congenial to the
hippies and others who preferred to drop out of the bustle of consumer
society and pursue what they saw as greater and more personally
meaningful aims. Moreover, Thoreau politicized the American landscape
and nature itself, giving us a liberal view on the wilderness whose
legacy can be felt in the Sierra Club and the Green Party. He did
not perceive nature as a dead and passive object of conquest and
exploitation, as it was for many of the early pioneers for whom
land meant survival. Rather, he saw in it a lively and vibrant world
unto itself, a spectacle of change, growth, and constancy that could
infuse us all with spiritual meaning if we pursued it. Finally,
Thoreau gave generations of American writers a distinctive style
to emulate: a combination of homey, folksy talk with erudite allusions,
creating a tone that is both casual and majestic.
