Thoreau, Henry David (1817–1862), writer, scientist, transcendentalist.Of the better‐known writers of Concord, Massachusetts, only Thoreau was born there. After graduating from Harvard in 1837 he returned home, became friends with Ralph Waldo
Emerson, and embarked on a career of reading, writing, and observing nature. His short stints of gainful employment included work as a day laborer, pencil maker, and surveyor. Except for brief excursions to Staten Island, Cape Cod, Maine, Montreal, New Jersey, and Minnesota, he spent the rest of his life in Concord, where, as he said, he traveled extensively. On 4 July 1845, he began the intermittent stay of just over two years at nearby Walden Pond that is chronicled in his autobiographical and philosophical work
Walden (1854). Incontestably a masterpiece of American
literature,
Walden, structured around Thoreau's observations of the changing seasons, has inspired a small library of similar volumes.
The first to call for national parks (in
The Maine Woods, 1864), Thoreau was also a pioneer ecologist (
The Succession of Forest Trees, 1860, and the posthumous
Faith in a Seed) and an originator of America's conservation ethic. He understood nature not as an adversary but as the cradle and matrix of human existence, and wilderness not as the antithesis, but as the source, of civilization. “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” he wrote. Thoreau crossed the boundaries of literature and science, indeed, his last writings, some still unpublished, are almost purely scientific.
In his nature writing, Thoreau promulgated a gospel of immediate experience and the present moment: “I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows.” He reminded his own and successive generations of their link to nature. As he wrote in his journal for 17 May 1854: “Who shall distinguish between the
law by which a brook finds its river, the
instinct [by which] a bird performs its migrations, and the
knowledge by which a man steers his ship round the globe?”
Interested in social reform as well as in the environment, Thoreau in July 1846 was jailed overnight for refusing to pay a poll tax as a protest against the
Mexican War and the expansion of
slavery. He supported John
Brown's raids and assisted fugitive slaves fleeing northward. His social thought, akin to that of classical Stoicism, emphasized self‐rule and
individualism as the true basis for community. His essay
Civil Disobedience (1849) asserts the primacy of the individual conscience, declaring: “It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law so much as for the right.” In such works as
Walden and
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), Thoreau forged a personal ethic which held that for a guide to life, one must turn not to the state, the gods, society, or even history, but to nature. He recognized, however, that the turn to nature and to the self were merely starting points. With Emerson, Margaret
Fuller, and the other transcendentalists, he understood the social imperatives latent in the insistence on personal worth and autonomy: What applies to the individual applies to everyone; if I wish to be free, all must be free.
See also
Antebellum Era;
Antislavery;
Conservation Movement;
Environmentalism;
Leopold, Aldo;
Muir, John;
Romantic Movement;
Transcendentalism.
Bibliography
Robert D. Richardson Jr. , Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, 1986.
Lawrence Buell , The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing and the Formation of American Culture, 1995.
Robert D. Richardson Jr.
