Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau an American essayist, poet, naturalist and social critic (1817-1862), whose experiment in simple living at Walden Pond, his defence of individual conscience against unjust government and his close observations of the natural world made him a central figure of American transcendentalism and an enduring influence on environmental and libertarian thought.

Life and Concord

Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, on 12 July 1817, the son of a pencil-maker and the descendant of French Huguenot and Scottish ancestors. He studied at Harvard College, graduating in 1837, and worked for a time as a schoolmaster, but he found the routine of teaching uncongenial and soon turned to other pursuits. Concord was the home of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Thoreau became a member of the circle of transcendentalists that gathered around him and found in the town a place of plain living and high thinking.

In 1844 he accidentally set fire to a part of the woods near Concord, an event that troubled him for years and made him the object of local resentment, and by the following spring he had decided to build a small house on the shore of Walden Pond, on land belonging to Emerson, where he lived for two years, two months and two days. The experiment was intended as a practical test of whether a person could live a life of simplicity, independence and reflection amid the demands of a commercial society.

Walden and Simple Living

Walden, published in 1854, is the record of Thoreau's life at the pond, an account of his house, his expenses, his visitors, the plants and animals about him, and the thoughts that arose from his solitude. It is at once a memoir, a work of natural history and a moral essay, and it argues that a life of simplicity and self-reliance is both more honest and more rewarding than the frantic accumulation of material goods and the endless labour that such accumulation requires and that consumes the greater part of a human life.

Thoreau built his cabin for a small sum, cultivated beans, observed the seasons and wrote, and he insisted that he had gone to the woods to live deliberately and to front only the essential facts of life. He measured his wants carefully and found that much of what his neighbours regarded as necessary was in fact a burden, an insight that gave his book its enduring power as a criticism of the economic assumptions of his age and of the restlessness and anxiety that they produce in the minds of those who submit to them without question.

Civil Disobedience and Political Thought

In 1846 Thoreau spent a night in jail for refusing to pay a poll tax, as a protest against slavery and against the war with Mexico, which he regarded as an unrighteous attempt to extend the territory of the slaveholding states. The episode gave rise to his essay Resistance to Civil Government, later known as Civil Disobedience, in which he argued that the individual has a duty to follow his conscience rather than the law when the law requires him to be an agent of injustice. He wrote it after his night in prison, and the experience convinced him that a single honest man in opposition to an unjust government was a greater force than any number of silent and obedient citizens.

He held that a government which imprisons any person unjustly is itself unjust, and that the proper place for a just man under such a government is a prison cell, the only place in a slave state where a free man can abide with honour. He did not advocate the abolition of government altogether but the immediate improvement of it, and he looked forward to a state that would recognise the individual as the source of its authority and would not interfere with those who refuse to support its wrongs. The essay was to prove one of the most influential pieces of political writing produced in America, and its example was followed by later movements of conscience in many parts of the world.

Natural History and Transcendentalism

Thoreau was associated with the transcendentalist movement, whose members held that the divine pervades nature and humanity and that truth may be reached through intuition as well as through the understanding. The essay Nature, written by his friend Emerson, had set out the movement's creed, and Thoreau carried its ideas into a life of observation and experiment among the woods and fields of his native region, seeking in the natural world the spiritual renewal that his friends described in more abstract terms.

Yet he was also a patient and scrupulous student of nature in the manner of a scientist. He recorded the dates of flowering and migration, measured the depth of the pond, traced the growth rings of trees and studied the dispersal of seeds, and his late essays on the succession of forest trees and on the dispersion of seeds contributed to the emerging science of ecology and won the respect of later botanists for their care and accuracy and for the precision of their observations. His work thus united the poetic vision of transcendentalism with the patient method of the naturalist, and it prepared the way for later writers who would treat nature as both a science and a source of meaning.

Last Years and Influence

Thoreau contracted tuberculosis, the disease that had killed his brother, and his health declined during the 1850s, yet he continued to work and to travel as long as his strength allowed. He supported the antislavery cause with speeches and essays, defending the raid of John Brown in terms that shocked many of his neighbours, and he continued to revise his manuscripts almost to the end. He died at Concord on 6 May 1862, and his friend Emerson delivered the funeral address. He lived long enough to see his reputation grow, and the small body of work he left behind proved more influential than its size would suggest, for it gave American thought a lasting voice of protest and of hope.

His influence has been wide and various. Environmentalists, political dissenters, advocates of simple living and students of American literature have all claimed him as a forerunner, and figures from Mahatma Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr. acknowledged the power of his essay on civil disobedience. He remains a symbol of the individual conscience in conflict with the demands of the state and of a life lived deliberately in the service of truth, freedom and the natural world. His writings have continued to attract readers who find in them a model of integrity, and his example has done as much as his arguments to keep alive the ideal of a life lived in accordance with conviction.

See also

• Walden
• Civil Disobedience
• Transcendentalism
• American nature writing