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Henry David Thoreau
"If a man does not keep pace with his companions perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."-Henry David Thoreau
"He is a keen and delicate observer of nature - a genuine observer - which, I suspect, is almost as rare a character as even an original poet; and Nature, in return for his love, seems to adopt him as her especial child, and shows him secrets which few others are allowed to witness."-Nathaniel Hawthorne, from his journal, September 1, 1842
Born in Concord, MA, on July 12, 1817, Concord's most famous native son was a quintessentially American essayist and naturalist. He graduated from Harvard College at age 20 and worked briefly in the Thoreau (pronounced like "thorough," with the accent on the first syllable) family's pencil factory before taking up life as a teacher. With his brother John, he established a school in Concord based on Transcendentalism, a philosophy he learned from Concord friend and neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson. When John died of lockjaw in 1842, Thoreau closed the school and moved in with Emerson, working as his handyman. With Emerson's encouragement, he continued to keep a journal and published a few pieces in the Dial, a Transcendentalist journal.
In 1845, Thoreau
built himself a one-room cabin on
Walden Pond where he set out to
"live deep and suck out all the
marrow of life." He lived in the cabin
on and off for two years, faithfully
recording the experience in his
journal. Seven years later, he would
publish Walden; or Life in the
Woods, a collection of essays
based on his journal and describing
his personal philosophy of
self-sufficiency and antimaterialism.
An ardent abolitionist and staunch
defender of John Brown, during his
stay on Walden Pond, Thoreau was
arrested and jailed for one night for
failing to pay his poll tax, which he
did to protest slavery and the
government's "imperialist"
Mexican-American war. That
experience would become the basis
for his essay "On the Duty of Civil
Disobedience."
In the early 1850s, he
moved back to his family home in
Concord, working again in the family
pencil business and as a surveyor,
an outdoor job that would provide the
basis for numerous essays and
publications on natural history,
ecology, and man's place in nature.
In 1860, while working outdoors he
caught a cold that quickly turned into
bronchitis. Already suffering from
tuberculosis (from which his older
sister Helen had apparently died in
1849), his health steadily
deteriorated, and on May 6, 1862, shy
of his forty-fifth birthday, he died at
home in Concord. He is buried on
Author's Ridge next to the graves of
Emerson, Alcott, and Hawthorne in
Concord's Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.
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Upcoming events
- Thursday, February 9th at 2 pm - Theodora Goss, "The Thorn and the Blossom"(1 day)
- Sunday, February 12th at 3 pm - Toby Lester, "Da Vinci's Ghost"(4 days)
- Sunday, February 19th at 3 pm - Sarah McCoy, "The Baker's Daughter"(11 days)
- Sunday, February 26th at 3 pm - Margot Livesey, "The Flight of Gemma Hardy"(18 days)
- Sunday, March 11th at 3 pm - Kate Flora, "Redemption"(32 days)
- Sunday, March 18th at 3 pm - Madeline Miller, "The Song of Achilles"(39 days)
- Thursday March 22th at 7 pm - Howard Frank Mosher, "The Great Northern Express"(43 days)
- Sunday, March 25th at 3 pm - Natalie Dykstra, "Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life"(46 days)
- Sunday, April 1st at 3 pm - Deborah Kops, The "Great Molasses Flood", and Heather Lang, "Queen of the Track"(53 days)
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