Henry David Thoreau

About this figure

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was an American writer and philosopher who spent much of his life in and around Concord, Massachusetts, testing through direct personal experiment the ideas about self-reliance and simplicity that Ralph Waldo Emerson, his friend, neighbor, and sometime employer, was developing in essay form. A Harvard graduate who worked briefly as a schoolteacher and later helped run his family's pencil-making business, Thoreau is remembered above all for a two-year experiment in deliberate, simplified living: in 1845 he built a small cabin on land Emerson owned beside Walden Pond and lived there for two years, two months, and two days, growing his own food, observing the changing seasons in close detail, and writing the book that would become Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854), at once a practical account of frugal living and a sustained meditation on what he considered the unexamined haste of ordinary life.

Thoreau's other defining act came in 1846, when he spent a night in the Concord jail for refusing to pay a poll tax, a protest against slavery and against the Mexican-American War, which he opposed as an act of national aggression in service of expanding slave territory. The essay that grew out of that arrest, generally known today as Civil Disobedience, argued that individuals have not only a right but a duty to disobey unjust laws and refuse complicity with a government committing injustice, and it later influenced figures including Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Thoreau was an active participant in the abolitionist movement more broadly, sheltering fugitives from slavery on the Underground Railroad and publicly defending the militant abolitionist John Brown after his raid on Harpers Ferry.

Beyond Walden, Thoreau wrote extensively about travel and the natural world close to home: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) recounted a boating trip with his brother John; The Maine Woods and Cape Cod, both published after his death, gathered his accounts of wilder or more exposed landscapes than Concord's; and his essay Walking, also published posthumously, argued for wildness as a necessary counterweight to civilization. He kept an enormous personal journal for most of his adult life, running to roughly two million words, which supplied much of the raw material for his published work and which modern scholars now treat as a major work in its own right. He died of tuberculosis at forty-four, having spent his final years revising manuscripts and pursuing detailed botanical observations of the Concord countryside.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.