Concord (river)

Concord river, c.15 mi (24 km) long, NE Mass., a short tributary of the Merrimack, which it joins at Lowell. On Apr. 19, 1775, colonial militia fired some of the first shots of the American Revolution at the British over a bridge across the river at Concord, Mass. Henry David Thoreau 's first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), records a boat trip with his brother.

Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, A, autobiographical narrative by Thoreau, published in 1849. It was written, mainly during the period described in Walden, from earlier journal entries, poems, and essays. The narrative describes seven days in a small boat during a trip (Aug. 31–Sept. 13, 1839), which the author made with his brother John to the White Mountains in New Hampshire. From the description of the homemade dory, which was “painted green below, with a border of blue, with reference to the two elements in which it was to spend its existence,” to the account of New Hampshire people, the book maintains a certain air of romantic adventure, but the travel narrative is subordinated to learned digressions into history, religion, and philosophy; poetry; discussions of literary classics; and such Emersonian essays as the one on friendship. Some of the passages have been frequently quoted, for Thoreau's style was already fully developed, and was said by Lowell to have “an antique purity.” During the author's lifetime, the book was not popular. Later editors, like H.S. Canby, have given it a more compact form by eliminating “indoor additions.”

Thoreau, Henry David (1817–62), American author, became a follower and friend of Emerson. He supported himself by a variety of occupations; a few of his poems were published in the Dial, but he made no money from literature, and published only two books in his lifetime. The first was A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849); the second, Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854), attracted little attention but has since been recognized as a literary masterpiece and as one of the seminal books of the century. It describes his two-year experiment in self-sufficiency (1845–7) when he built himself a wooden hut on the edge of Walden Pond, near Concord; he describes his domestic economy, his agricultural experiments, his visitors and neighbours, the plants and wild life, and the sense of the Indian past, with a deeply challenging directness that questions the materialism and the prevailing work ethic of the age. Walden is studded with apparently causal illuminations and with lines of poetic sensibility. Equally influential in future years was his essay ‘Civil Disobedience’ (1849; originally entitled ‘Resistance to Civil Government’), in which he argues the right of the individual to refuse to pay taxes when conscience dictates and describes the technique of passive resistance later adopted by Gandhi. Thoreau has also been hailed as a pioneer ecologist. His Journal (14 vols) and his collected Writings (20 vols) were both published in 1906.