biography
| name: |
Thoreau, Henry (David)
|
| |
originally David Henry Thoreau
|
pronunciation:
[thoroh]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1817–62)
|
| biography:
| Writer and poet, born in Concord, Massachusetts, USA. After graduating from Harvard (1837), where he began his lifelong habit of keeping journals, he taught briefly in Concord but resigned to protest the disciplinary whipping of students. He helped in his father's pencil factory, and then, with his brother John Thoreau, opened a private school in Concord (1838), based on Transcendentalism, the literary and philosophical movement espoused by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, and Orestes Brownson. When John became fatally ill, the school was closed and Henry lived in Emerson's home as a sort of handyman while he maintained his practice of writing in his journal. He published a few pieces in the Transcendentalist journal Dial, wrote poetry, and lectured at the Concord Lyceum. In 1843–4 he went to Staten Island, NY to tutor the children of Emerson's brother, William Emerson, and upon his return built a small structure on Emerson's land alongside Walden Pond. During his stay there (4 Jul 1845 to 6 Sep 1847), he was jailed one night for refusing to pay a poll tax meant to support America's war in Mexico. In 1849 he published an essay on this experience, ‘Resistance to Civil Government’ (later known as ‘On the Duty of Civil Disobedience’), which in its call for passive resistance to unjust laws was to inspire Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr (Thomas Carlyle called it the one truly original American contribution to civilization.) During this time he completed the manuscript for A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), a ruminative account of a trip he had taken with his brother John in 1839. The journal he kept at Walden became the source of his most famous book, Walden, Or Life in the Woods (1854), in which he set forth his ideas on how an individual should best live to be attuned to his own nature as well as to nature itself. After leaving Walden, he lived with Emerson (1847–9) and then for the rest of his life in his family home. He occasionally worked at the pencil factory and did some surveying work while he made brief trips to such places as Cape Cod, ME and (in 1861) as far as Minnesota. By the 1850s he had become greatly concerned over slavery, and, having met John Brown in 1857, he wrote passionately in his defence. He lived out his final years knowing he had tuberculosis, and spent much of his time preparing his journals and manuscripts for what indeed proved to be posthumous publication. Little known outside his circle in his day, it was not until later in the 20th-c that he came to be regarded as one of America's major literary thinkers. |
|
|
