Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Henry David Thoreau was born and raised in Concord, Massachusetts, and attended Harvard University in Boston from 1833-1837.  After university, he returned home and performed a variety of jobs including working in his father’s pencil shop, teaching at a grammar school, and serving as an assistant to Ralph Waldo Emerson, in whose household he lived periodically between 1841 and 1843.  Thoreau had encountered Emerson’s writings while at Harvard, and took up and discussed Transcendentalist ideas with Emerson and others in Concord; Thoreau published poems and prose in the Transcendentalist journal The Dial and in the early 1840s helped Emerson edit the magazine.  Thoreau’s return to Concord in 1837 also prompted his beginning of a journal in which he recorded observations of nature, literature, daily activities, and ideas.  Some of his best known observations emerged from his nearly two-year residence at Walden Pond near Concord, where beginning in 1845 he lived in a small dwelling and subsisted through gardening and doing odd jobs as he wrote.  From sections edited and distilled from his journal, Thoreau published his first book A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers in 1849, a record of his excursion in 1839 by rowboat down these rivers, and in 1854 published his reflections on nature and society in Walden.  Thoreau’s practice of questioning received social institutions and practices generated anti-slavery lectures and the essay “Resistance to Civil Government” (1849).  Further sections from his journal writings were published posthumously as Excursions (1863), The Maine Woods (1864), Cape Cod (1865), and A Yankee in Canada (1866), and his complete journal was published in 1905. (BH)

For choice daily segments quoted from Thoreau’s journal, see Gregory Perry’s “The Blog of Henry David Thoreau.”  http://blogthoreau.blogspot.com/

Works Consulted:

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862): A Guide to Resources.  http://www.transcendentalists.com/thoreau_biography.htm

Lauter, Paul, ed. The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Vol. 1.  Lexington, Mass: D. C. Heath and Co., 1994.