Henry David Thoreau

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Henry David Thoreau

• 1817-1862

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• Hawthorne said that Thoreau was tedious,
  tiresome and intolerable. But, he also added
  he has great qualities of intellect and
  character.
• He seemed born for great enterprise and for
  command, Emerson said years later at Thoreaus
  funeral, and I so much regret the loss of his
  rare powers of action, that I cannot help
  counting it a fault in him that he had not
  ambition. Wanting this, instead of engineering
  for all America, he was the captain of the
  Huckleberry party.

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• He was born David Henry Thoreau in Concord,
  Massachussetts, in 1817.
• His father was a pencil maker his mother took in
  boarders, one of them being Emersons sister.
• Thoreaus attachment to Concord was established
  early in his life as he would wander the woods
  with his fishing pole.

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• He attended Harvard in 1833 and graduated in the
  middle of his class.
• At Harvard he became familiar with English
  literature and with German philosophers who
  provided much of the underpinnings of
  Transcendentalism.
• He was independent and eccentric.

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• Thoreau would eventually depart for Walden Pond
  where Emerson had offered him the use of some
  land.
• The experiment at Walden Pond was an attempt to
  rediscover the grandeur and heroism inherent in a
  simple life led close to Nature (205).
• I wish to meet the facts of life, he wrote in
  his journal, the vital facts, which are the
  phenomenon or actuality the gods meant to show
  usand so I came down here.

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Walden

• Again and again in Walden, Thoreau would return
  to images drawn from Greek and Latin epics,
  asserting the essential brotherhood between the
  adventurers of the mythic past and the
  truth-seeking voyager of the present (205).

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• The mass of men, as one of his most famous
  sentences in Walden puts it, lead lives of quiet
  desperation.
• When he look toward town, Thoreau saw his
  prosperous fellow citizens so caught up in the
  material pursuits of making a living that they
  had become one-dimensional (206).

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• Walden is considered one of the greatest works
  ever produced in America. It successfully blends
  style and content his style is simple- at least
  on the surface.
• For Thoreau, as for Emerson and the Romantics
  who preceded them, Nature itself was a form of
  language behind its outward appearance, Nature
  contained spiritual reality. Nature spoke to us,
  if we could understand the message about those
  vital facts which the gods meant to show us
  (206).

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• While at Walden, as a protest against the Mexican
  War (seen as an attempt to extend American slave
  owning territory), Thoreau refused to pay his
  poll tax and spent a night in jail until someone
  paid it for him.
• He was vocally and radically opposed to slavery.

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• Thoreau remained at Walden for a little over two
  years. In 1847, he moved in with Emerson and did
  odds jobs to help pay his room and board.
• He eventually moved to his fathers house in
  Concord, where he remained for the rest of his
  life. He became a kind of Concord record keeper,
  tracking rainfall, snowfall, the first days of
  frost and the first days of spring.
• He died of tuberculosis in 1862.

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• Sam staple told Emerson that he, never saw a man
  dying with so much pleasure and peace.
• Henry, have you made your peace with God? his
  aunt is said to have asked him toward the end.
  Why Aunt, he replied, I didnt know we ever
  quarreled.

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