Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1817, and graduated from Harvard in 1837. He worked as a schoolteacher, in his family’s pencil business and as a land surveyor, and lived for a time in Emerson’s household, who encouraged him to write and to keep the journal that eventually filled many volumes.

On 4 July 1845 he moved into a cabin he had built on Emerson’s land by Walden Pond, outside Concord, and lived there for two years, reading, writing, walking and observing the life of the woods and the pond. In 1846 he spent a night in jail for refusing to pay a poll tax, in protest against slavery and the Mexican War; his essay on civil disobedience (1849) grew from the experience.

Walden, published in 1854, distils his years at the pond into an account of the seasons and an argument for simplicity, self-reliance and wakefulness. At Walden he read the Bhagavad Gītā, which he describes in the book. In later years he wrote as a naturalist and defended the abolitionist John Brown. He died of tuberculosis in 1862, at the age of forty-four.