Author

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau
  • In the early spring of 1845, Henry David Thoreau built and lived in a cabin near the shore of Walden Pond in rural Massachusetts. For the next two years, he enacted his own Transcendentalist experiment, living a simple life based on self-reliance, individualism, and harmony with nature. The journal he kept at that time evolved into his masterwork,Walden, an eloquent expression of a uniquely American philosophy.

    During the same period, Thoreau endured a one-day imprisonment for his refusal to pay a poll tax, an act of protest against the government for supporting the Mexican War, to which he was morally opposed. In his essay "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience," he defends the principles of such nonviolent protest, setting an example that has influenced such figures as Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., and that endures to this day.

    Henry David Thoreau is today considered one of the most influential figures in American thought and literature.

  • In 1839, two years after graduating from Harvard, Henry David Thoreau and his older brother, John, took a boat-and-hiking trip from Concord, Massachusetts, to the White Mountains of New Hampshire. After John’s sudden death in 1842, Thoreau began to prepare a memorial account of their excursion during his stay at Walden Pond. Modern readers have come to see Thoreau’s story of the river journey as an appropriate predecessor to Walden, depicting the early years of his spiritual and artistic growth.

    “Just as the current of the stream bears along the boat with Thoreau and his brother, so the current of ideas in his mind bears along the reader by evoking the joy and nostalgia that Thoreau feels for those lost, golden days. As Thoreau says, human life is very much like a river running always downward to the sea, and in this book we enter for a moment the flow of Thoreau’s unique existence.”—Masterplots

  • Compiled from magazine articles published in the 1850s after his death, Cape Cod details several short trips Thoreau made to "the bare and bended arm ofMassachusetts" between 1849 and 1855. "He went to the Cape out of curiosity," explains Paul Theroux, "but in the course of his travel a great thing happened: Thoreau, the woodsman and landlubber, discovered the sea."

    Encounters with the ocean dominate the book, from the fatal shipwreck of the opening episode to the late reflections on the Pilgrims' Cape Cod landing and reconnaissance. Along the way, Thoreau relates the experiences of fishermen and oystermen, lighthouse keepers and ship captains, and their chronicles of exploration, settlement, and survival on the Cape against the threats of the wild sea and of encroaching modernity.