best biography henry david thoreau

By Elizabeth Witherell, with Elizabeth Dubrulle

THOREAU'S EARLY YEARS

Henry Thoreau was born in 1817 in Concord , where his father, John, was a shopkeeper. John moved his family to Chelmsford and Boston, following business opportunities. In 1823 the family moved back to Concord where John established a pencil-making concern that eventually brought financial stability to the family. Thoreau's mother, Cynthia Dunbar, took in boarders for many years to help make ends meet. Thoreau's older siblings, Helen and John, Jr., were both schoolteachers; when it was decided that their brother should go to Harvard College, as had his grandfather before him, they contributed from their teaching salaries to help pay his expenses, at that time about $179 a year.

ASPIRING WRITER

He returned to Concord after his graduation in 1837 and took up the profession of teaching, first at the district school and then in a school he opened with his brother John. He had already begun to think of himself as a writer, however, and when he and John had to close their school in 1841 Thoreau accepted an offer to stay with neighboring Emerson's family and earn his keep as a handyman while he concentrated on his writing.

GETTING A LIVING

For a steady income, he relied on two sources: the family pencil business and his own practice as a surveyor. The Thoreau family became involved in manufacturing pencils in the 1820s, and Thoreau used his talent as an engineer to improve the product. He invented a machine that ground the plumbago for the leads into a very fine powder and developed a combination of the finely ground plumbago and clay that resulted in a pencil that produced a smooth, regular line. He also improved the method of assembling the casing and the lead. Thoreau pencils were the first produced in America that equaled those made by the German company, Faber, whose pencils set the standard for quality. In the 1850s, when the electrotyping process of printing began to be used widely, the Thoreaus shifted from pencil-making to supplying large quantities of their finely ground plumbago to printing companies. Thoreau continued to run the company after his father's death in 1859. Characteristically, Thoreau put the business letters and invoices associated with the company to a second use as scrap paper for lists and notes, and drafts of his late unfinished natural history essays.

TRANSCENDENTALISM

Thoreau and the Transcendentalist movement in New England grew up together. Thoreau was nineteen years old when Emerson published Nature , an essay that articulates the philosophical underpinnings of the movement. Transcendentalism began as a radical religious movement, opposed to the rationalist, conservative institution that Unitarianism had become. Many of the movement's early proponents were or had been Unitarian ministers, Emerson among them.

INDIVIDUALISM

In "Civil Disobedience," Thoreau expressed his belief in the power and, indeed, the obligation of the individual to determine right from wrong, independent of the dictates of society: "any man more right than his neighbors, constitutes a majority of one" ( Reform Papers , 74). While many of his contemporaries espoused this view, few practiced it in their own lives as consistently as Thoreau. Thoreau exercised his right to dissent from the prevailing views in many ways, large and small. He worked for pay intermittently; he cultivated relationships with several of the town's outcasts; he lived alone in the woods for two years; he never married; he signed off from the First Parish Church rather than be taxed automatically to support it every year.

I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account; for, beside that before he has fairly learned it I may have found out another for myself, I desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible; but I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father's or his mother's or his neighbor's instead. The youth may build or plant or sail, only let him not be hindered from doing that which he tells me he would like to do. It is by a mathematical point only that we are wise, as the sailor or the fugitive slave keeps the polestar in his eye; but that is sufficient guidance for all our life. We may not arrive at our port within a calculable period, but we would preserve the true course. ( Walden , 71)

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. ( Walden , 326)

be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought. ( Walden , 321)

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. ( Walden , 135)

the man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready ( Walden , 72)

MATERIALISM

Allying himself with an ancient tradition of asceticism, Thoreau considered the ownership of material possessions beyond the basic necessities of life to be an obstacle, rather than an advantage. He saw that most people measured their worth in terms of what they owned, and stood this common assumption on its head.

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. ( Walden , 5)

a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone. ( Walden , 82)

By the words, necessary of life , I mean whatever, of all that man obtains by his own exertions, has been from the first, or from long use has become, so important to human life that few, if any, whether from savageness, or poverty, or philosophy, ever attempt to do without it. ( Walden , 12)

Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hinderances to the elevation of mankind ( Walden , 14)

my greatest skill has been to want but little. ( Walden , 69)

For more than five years I maintained myself thus solely by the labor of my hands, and I found, that by working about six weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living. The whole of my winters, as well as most of my summers, I had free and clear for study. ( Walden , 69)

It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow, unless he sweats easier than I do. ( Walden , 71)

TECHNOLOGY AND PROGRESS

Thoreau, himself an inventor and an engineer of sorts, was fascinated by technology, and the mid-nineteenth century saw a series of inventions that would radically change the world, such as power looms, railroads, and the telegraph. But these inventions were products of a larger movement, the industrial revolution, in which Thoreau saw the potential for the destruction of nature for the ends of commerce. In Thoreau's view, technology also provoked an excitement that was counterproductive because it served as a distraction from the important questions of life.

perhaps we are led oftener by the love of novelty, and a regard for the opinions of men, in procuring it, than by a true utility. ( Walden , 21)

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. ( Walden , 52)

I watch the passage of the morning cars with the same feeling that I do the rising of the sun, which is hardly more regular. Their train of clouds stretching far behind and rising higher and higher, going to heaven while the cars are going to Boston, conceals the sun for a minute and casts my distant field into the shade, a celestial train beside which the petty train of cars which hugs the earth is but the barb of the spear. The stabler of the iron horse was up early this winter morning by the light of the stars amid the mountains, to fodder and harness his steed. Fire, too, was awakened thus early to put the vital heat in him and get him off. If the enterprise were as innocent as it is early! If the snow lies deep, they strap on his snow-shoes, and with the giant plow, plow a furrow from the mountains to the seaboard, in which the cars, like a following drill-barrow, sprinkle all the restless men and floating merchandise in the country for seed. All day the fire-steed flies over the country, stopping only that his master may rest, and I am awakened by his tramp and defiant snort at midnight, when in some remote glen in the woods he fronts the elements incased in ice and snow; and he will reach his stall only with the morning star, to start once more on his travels without rest or slumber. Or perchance, at evening, I hear him in his stable blowing off the superfluous energy of the day, that he may calm his nerves and cool his liver and brain for a few hours of iron slumber. If the enterprise were as heroic and commanding as it is protracted and unwearied! ( Walden , 116-117)

Thoreau was a dedicated, self-taught naturalist, who disciplined himself to observe the natural phenomena around Concord systematically and to record his observations almost daily in his Journal. The Journal contains initial formulations of ideas and descriptions that appear in Thoreau's lectures, essays, and books; early versions of passages that reached final form in Walden can be found in the Journal as early as 1846. Thoreau's observations of nature enrich all of his work, even his essays on political topics. Images and comparisons based on his studies of animal behavior, of the life cycles of plants, and of the features of the changing seasons illustrate and enliven the ideas he puts forth in Walden .

All day long the red squirrels came and went, and afforded me much entertainment by their manoeuvres. One would approach at first warily through the shrub-oaks, running over the snow crust by fits and starts like a leaf blown by the wind, now a few paces this way, with wonderful speed and waste of energy, making inconceivable haste with his "trotters," as if it were for a wager, and now as many paces that way, but never getting on more than half a rod at a time; and then suddenly pausing with a ludicrous expression and a gratuitous somerset, as if all the eyes in the universe were fixed on him,--for all the motions of a squirrel, even in the most solitary recesses of the forest, imply spectators as much as those of a dancing girl,--wasting more time in delay and circumspection than would have sufficed to walk the whole distance,--I never saw one walk,--and then suddenly, before you could say Jack Robinson, he would be in the top of a young pitch-pine, winding up his clock and chiding all imaginary spectators, soliloquizing and talking to all the universe at the same time,--for no reason that I could ever detect, or he himself was aware of, I suspect. ( Walden , 273-274)

The grass flames up on the hillsides like a spring fire,--"et primitus oritur herba imbribus primoribus evocata,"--as if the earth sent forth an inward heat to greet the returning sun; not yellow but green is the color of its flame;--the symbol of perpetual youth, the grass-blade, like a long green ribbon, streams from the sod into the summer, checked indeed by the frost, but anon pushing on again, lifting its spear of last year's hay with the fresh life below. . . . So our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity. ( Walden , 310-311)

Once it chanced that I stood in the very abutment of a rainbow's arch, which filled the lower stratum of the atmosphere, tinging the grass and leaves around, and dazzling me as if I looked through colored crystal. It was a lake of rainbow light, in which, for a short while, I lived like a dolphin. If it had lasted longer it might have tinged my employments and life. ( Walden , 202)

The love of nature that is evident in Thoreau's descriptions in Walden is one of the most powerful aspects of the book. The environmental movement of the past thirty years has embraced Thoreau as a guiding spirit, and he is valued for his early understanding of the idea that nature is made up of interrelated parts. He is considered by many to be the father of the environmental movement.

BEFORE AND AFTER WALDEN

Walden is Thoreau's best-known book, but other works of his written both before and after Walden have met with favorable responses. All of his writing except his poetry is expository--he wrote no fiction--and much of it is built on the framework of the journey, short or long, external or interior. A Week , The Maine Woods , Cape Cod , and the essays "A Winter Walk," "A Walk to Wachusett," and "A Yankee in Canada," for example, are all structured as traditional travel narratives. The speaker--and it is useful to remember that almost all of Thoreau's published essays and books were first presented as lectures--sets out from home in each case, and the reader experiences the wonders of each new place with him, sharing the meditations it inspires, and finally returning with him to Concord with a deeper understanding of both native and foreign places and of the journeying self. Other essays take the reader on different kinds of journeys--through the foliage of autumn ("Autumnal Tints"), through the cultivated and wild orchards of history ("Wild Apples"), through the life-cycle of a plot of land as one species of tree gives way to another ("The Succession of Forest Trees").

I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost say, as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called Negro Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both north and south. It is hard to have a southern overseer; it is worse to have a northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself. (7)

and was at first reluctant to speak at abolitionist rallies because he felt he was expected to follow certain formulas, he later gave several impassioned lectures in response to the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law and in support of the activities of John Brown . Considering his neighbors' dismissive responses to Brown at the news of his death, Thoreau wrote,

I hear another ask, Yankee-like, "What will he gain by it?" as if he expected to fill his pockets by this enterprise. Such a one has no idea of gain but in this worldly sense. If it does not lead to a "surprise" party, if he does not get a new pair of boots, or a vote of thanks, it must be a failure. "But he won't gain any thing by it." Well, no, I don't suppose he could get four-and-sixpence a day for being hung, take the year round; but then he stands a chance to save a considerable part of his soul--and such a soul!--when you do not. No doubt you can get more in your market for a quart of milk than for a quart of blood, but that is not the market that heroes carry their blood to. ("A Plea for Captain John Brown," Reform Papers , 119)

This essay was written in 1995 for an exhibit commemorating the 150th anniversary of Thoreau's move to Walden Pond and his writing of the American classic, Walden ; it has been updated for inclusion here. References are to Walden , ed. J. Lyndon Shanley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971) and to Reform Papers , ed. Wendell Glick (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973).

Translations of this essay

For a version of this essay in Estonian, translated by Karolin Lohmus in 2017, go to ELU LÕPUKS KORDA HENRY DAVID THOREAU .

For a version in Ukrainian, translated by Mary Davidson in 2019, go to [Ukranian translation] .

For a version in Russian, translated by Victor Rudnev in 2019, go to [Russian translation] .

Added October 2017; revised April 2019

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Henry David Thoreau

Laura Dassow Walls

An audiobook version is available .

640 pages | 44 halftones | 6 x 9 | © 2017

Biography and Letters

History: American History

Literature and Literary Criticism: American and Canadian Literature

Philosophy: American Philosophy

Religion: Philosophy of Religion, Theology, and Ethics

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New York Times

"One of the ten best books of 2017."

Wall Street Journal

"Laura Dassow Walls has written an engaging, sympathetic, and subtly learned biography that mounts a strong case for Thoreau's importance. . . .  Thoreau's political engagement isn't exactly news, but Walls foregrounds it vividly. . . . The details are sometimes wonderful. . . .  Walls's Thoreau is truly a man for all seasons, a person who, in many ways, is a 21st-century liberal’s idea of our best self: pro-­environmental, antiracist, anti-imperialist, feminist, reformist, spiritual but not religious. It is extraordinary how much there was in Thoreau to support this interpretation, and part of the power of Walls's book is how she traces these liberal and humane preoccupations to the radicalism of his family and of Concord’s intellectual life."

"In this definitive biography, the many facets of Thoreau are captured with grace and scholarly rigor by English professor Walls. By convention, she observes, there were 'two Thoreaus, both of them hermits, yet radically at odds with each other. One speaks for nature; the other for social justice.' Not so here. To reveal the author of  Walden  as one coherent person is Walls's mission, which she fully achieves; as a result of her vigilant focus Thoreau holds the center--no mean achievement in a work through whose pages move the great figures and cataclysmic events of the period. Emerson, Hawthorne, and Whitman are here; so are Frederick Douglass and John Brown. Details of everyday life lend roundness to this portrait as we follow Thoreau's progress as a writer and also as a reader. Walls attends to the breadth of Thoreau's social and political involvements (notably his concern for Native Americans and Irish-Americans and his committed abolitionism) and the depth of his scientific pursuits. The wonder is that, given her book's richness, Walls still leaves the reader eager to read Thoreau. Her scholarly blockbuster is an awesome achievement, a merger of comprehensiveness in content with pleasure in reading."

Publishers Weekly

"I've always been slightly skeptical of biography doorstops. . . . I read the book in two sittings. It will not be used as a doorstop--ever. . . .  Walls, scouring his published and unpublished writings, gives her readers hundreds of these fleeting chances to catch sight of a beautifully untamed but distinctly American existence. . . . Walls comes as close as any biographer has to giving us the wild Thoreau--disorienting and bewildering."  

John Kaag | Chronicle of Higher Education

"Superb. . . . Exuberant. . . . Walls paints a moving portrait of a brilliant, complex man."  

Fen Montaigne | New York Times

"A superbly researched and written literary portrait that broadens our understanding of the great American writer and pre-eminent naturalist. . . . Magnificent. . . . A sympathetic and honest portrait that fully captures the private and public life of this singular American figure."  

Kirkus Reviews, starred review

"Study the living being, not its dead shell. And this is precisely what Walls has done in her definitive life of this opinionated, often difficult, but always interesting writer. . . .  To her great credit, Walls gives us so much more than the quotable Thoreau, the bane of the American literature survey course. . . . She immerses herself and her readers fully in Thoreau’s environment, the fields, meadows, woods, and streets of Concord. Walls’s book is, first and foremost, the product of an extraordinary act of empathy. But it is also an outstanding literary achievement. No biographer has more credibly evoked those blisteringly cold, crystal-clear New England winter days, days that, thanks to Walls’s prose, sparkle, glimmer, and chill for us the way they once did for Thoreau. . . . The great imaginative accomplishment of Walls’s book is to put Thoreau firmly back into the community that fostered and, for the most part, protected him."  

Weekly Standard

"As Laura Dassow Walls makes clear in her excellent Henry David Thoreau: A Life , he was a man of obsessively high principles, self-contained, a stickler for details who insisted on his own way of seeing the world, however quirky. . . . Walls earns her keep, digging into Thoreau’s aphoristic letters and journals, finding acute reflections by his contemporaries, and drawing a wonderfully brisk and satisfying portrait. . ." 

Jay Parini | Times Literary Supplement

"This new biography is the masterpiece that the gadfly of youthful America deserves. I have been reading Henry David Thoreau and reading about him for 40 years; I’ve written a book about him myself. Yet often I responded to Laura Dassow Walls’s compelling narrative with mutterings such as 'I never knew that' and 'I hadn’t thought of it that way.' I found myself caught up in these New England lives all over again. . . . On a foundation of rigorous scholarship, Walls resurrects Thoreau’s life with a novelist’s sympathy and pacing."   

Michael Sims | Washington Post

"Beautifully written, this is a substantial volume in which every page feels essential. You won’t want to put it down."

Dianne Timblin | American Scientist

"Not only does the biographer capture the breadth and depth of Thoreau’s relations and work, she leaves us tantalized, wanting more."

Barbara Lloyd McMichael | Seattle Times

"While a large body of biographical studies has advanced our understanding of Thoreau, a work of literary biography that synthesizes this knowledge has long been overdue, one that reintroduces us to Thoreau and changes the way we see him. This is the achievement of Henry David Thoreau: A Life by Laura Dassow Walls. In this vivid, perceptive portrait, Walls reconciles several decades’ worth of scholarship into a new, authoritative biography that presents Thoreau in greater depth, clarity, and factual completeness. . . . Laura Dassow Walls has written what is sure to become the definitive biography of Henry David Thoreau."

The New England Quarterly

"Luminous. . . . Through Walls's biography, Thoreau once more challenges us to see, with his passion and intensity, the world in all its cruelty and its splendour, riddled with human lies and abundant in natural truths."

Financial Times

"Splendid . . . offers a multifaceted view of the many contradictions of his personality."

Robert Pogue Harrison | New York Review of Books

"Exhaustive, exhilarating. . . . With a light touch and prose equal to her subject, she introduces us to a Thoreau we need right now: a scientist, a moralist, a radical democrat, and an artist who might stir us to realize the highest ideals of self and nation."  

Hedgehog Review

"Laura Dassow Walls has written a grand, big-hearted biography, as compulsively readable as a great nineteenth century novel, chock-full of new and fascinating detail about Thoreau, his family, his friends, and his town. Walls's magnificent--landmark--achievement is the best all around biography of Thoreau ever written. It not only brings Thoreau vividly back to life, it will fundamentally change how we see him. We will hear no more about the 'hermit of Walden Pond.' Walls has given us a new socially engaged Thoreau for a new era, a freedom fighter for John Brown and America, and a necessary prophet and spokesman for Concord Mass. and Planet Earth."

Robert D. Richardson, author of Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind

"This volume is a rich introduction to Thoreau for those unfamiliar with him and an almost casually brilliant reintroduction for those who know and love him."

"Will be for many years to come the biography that readers will turn to in fruitful search of a life 'whole and entire.' It will supply good answers to the question of why Thoreau still matters, two hundred years after his birth."

Modern Intellectual History

"Every year, there is at least one new book about the life of Henry David Thoreau. But only once per generation is there a new, all-inclusive, scholarly biography. Laura Dassow Walls's 666-page door stopper is the one we have been waiting for--the most authoritative biography of Thoreau ever written."

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Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, on July 12, 1817. He was introduced to the countryside at a young age, and this first contact with the natural world sparked a lifelong fascination. Although his family lived in relative poverty, subsisting on the income from their small pencil-making business, Thoreau was able to attend Harvard University, where he gained an early reputation as an individualist. After graduating in 1837, he assisted his father with the family business and worked for several years as a schoolteacher.

In 1841, Thoreau was invited to live in the home of his neighbor, Ralph Waldo Emerson . There, he began meeting with the group now known as the Transcendentalist Club, which included A. Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, and George Ripley. Thoreau passed his time at the Emerson house writing essays and poems for the Transcendentalist journal The Dial and doing odd jobs, like gardening and mending fences. In 1845, he began building a small house on Emerson’s land on the shore of Walden Pond, where he spent more than two years “living deep and sucking out all the marrow of life.” His experiences there formed the basis for two books, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers , and his masterpiece, Walden , which advocated a lifestyle of self-sufficiency and simplicity.

Although Thoreau thought of himself primarily as a poet during his early years, he was later discouraged in this pursuit and gradually came to feel that poetry was too confining. It is as a prose writer that Thoreau made his most meaningful contributions, both as a stylist and as a philosopher. A tireless champion of the human spirit against the materialism and conformity that he saw as dominant in American culture, Thoreau’s ideas about individual resistance, as set forth in his 1849 essay “ Civil Disobedience ,” have influenced, among others, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.; and his mastery of prose style has been acknowledged by writers as disparate as Robert Louis Stevenson, Marcel Proust, Sinclair Lewis, and Henry Miller. Largely ignored in his own time, the self-styled “inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms” has emerged as one of America’s greatest literary figures.

Thoreau died of tuberculosis on May 6, 1862, in his native Concord.

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The 10 Best Books on Henry David Thoreau

Essential books by henry david thoreau.

There are numerous books on Henry David Thoreau, and it comes with good reason, he was an American naturalist, essayist, philosopher, and poet who helped lead the Transcendentalism movement of the mid-19th century, which taught that divinity pervades all nature and humanity.

“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this,” he remarked.

In order to get to the bottom of what inspired one of history’s foremost intellectuals to the heights of societal contribution, we’ve compiled a list of the 10 best books on Henry David Thoreau.

Henry David Thoreau: A Life by Laura Dassow Walls

There was much more to Thoreau than his brief experiment in living at Walden Pond. A member of the vibrant intellectual circle centered on his neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson, he was also an ardent naturalist, a manual laborer and inventor, a radical political activist, and more. Many books have taken up various aspects of Thoreau’s character and achievements, but, as Laura Dassow Walls writes, “Thoreau has never been captured between covers; he was too quixotic, mischievous, many-sided.”

Walls traces the full arc of Thoreau’s life, from his early days in the intellectual hothouse of Concord, when the American experiment still felt fresh and precarious, and “America was a family affair, earned by one generation and about to pass to the next.” By the time he died in 1862, at only forty-four years of age, Thoreau had witnessed the transformation of his world from a community of farmers and artisans into a bustling, interconnected commercial nation.

Drawing on Thoreau’s copious writings, published and unpublished, Walls presents a Thoreau vigorously alive in all his quirks and contradictions: the young man shattered by the sudden death of his brother; the ambitious Harvard College student; the ecstatic visionary who closed Walden with an account of the regenerative power of the Cosmos. We meet the man whose belief in human freedom and the value of labor made him an uncompromising abolitionist; the solitary walker who found society in nature, but also found his own nature in the society of which he was a deeply interwoven part.

The Days of Henry Thoreau by Walter Harding

In this widely acclaimed hallmark among books on Henry David Thoreau, scholars will find the culmination of a lifetime of research and study, meticulously documented; general readers will find an absorbing story of a remarkable man. Writing always with supreme clarity, Professor Walter Harding has marshaled all the facts so as best to “let them speak for themselves.” Thoreau’s thoughtfulness and stubbornness, his more than ordinarily human amalgam of the earthy and the sublime, his unquenchable vitality emerge to the reader as they did to his own family, friends, and critics.

You will see Thoreau’s work in his family’s pencil factory, his accidental setting of a forest fire, his love of children and hatred of hypocrisy, his contributions to the scientific understanding of forest trees, and other more and less familiar aspects of the man and his works. You will find the social as well as the reclusive Thoreau. Reactions to him by such notable contemporaries as Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Walt Whitman – with Thoreau’s responses to them – are given in rich detail.

Solid Seasons by Jeffrey S. Cramer

Any biography that concentrates on either Henry David Thoreau or Ralph Waldo Emerson tends to diminish the other figure, but in  Solid Seasons   both men remain central and equal. Through several decades of writing, friendship remained a primary theme for them both.

Collecting extracts from the letters and journals of both men, as well as words written about them by their contemporaries, Jeffrey S. Cramer beautifully illustrates the full nature of their twenty-five-year dialogue. Biographers like to point at the crisis in their friendship, focusing particularly on Thoreau’s disappointment in Emerson – rarely on Emerson’s own disappointment in Thoreau – and leaving it there, a friendship ruptured.

But the solid seasons remained, as is evident when, in 1878, Anne Burrows Gilchrist, the English writer and friend of Whitman, visited Emerson. She wrote that his memory of him was failing “as to recent names and topics but as is usual in such cases all the mental impressions that were made when he was in full vigor remain clear and strong.” As they chatted, Emerson called his wife, Lidian,

“Henry Thoreau,” she answered.

“Oh yes,” Emerson repeated. “Henry Thoreau.”

Expect Great Things by Kevin Dann

This sweeping, epic biography of Henry David Thoreau sees Thoreau’s world as the mystic himself saw it: filled with wonder and mystery; Native American myths and lore; wood sylphs, nature spirits, and fairies; battles between good and evil; and heroic struggles to live as a natural being in an increasingly synthetic world.

Above all,  Expect Great Things critically and authoritatively captures Thoreau’s simultaneously wild and intellectually keen sense of the mystical, mythical, and supernatural. Other historians have skipped past or undervalued these aspects of Thoreau’s life. In this groundbreaking work, historian and naturalist Kevin Dann restores Thoreau’s esoteric visions and explorations to their rightful place as keystones of the man himself.

American Bloomsbury by Susan Cheever

The 1850s were heady times in Concord, Massachusetts: in a town where a woman’s petticoat drying on an outdoor line was enough to elicit scandal, some of the greatest minds of our nation’s history were gathering in three of its wooden houses to establish a major American literary movement.

The Transcendentalists, as these thinkers came to be called, challenged the norms of American society with essays, novels, and treatises whose beautifully rendered prose and groundbreaking assertions still resonate with readers today. Though noted contemporary author Susan Cheever stands in awe of the monumental achievements of such writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Louisa May Alcott, her personal, evocative narrative removes these figures from their dusty pedestals and provides a lively account of their longings, jealousies, and indiscretions.

Thus, Cheever reminds us that the passion of Concord’s ambitious and temperamental resident geniuses was by no means confined to the page.

Walden and Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau

In 1845, Thoreau moved to a cabin that he built with his own hands along the shores of Walden Pond in Massachusetts. Shedding the trivial ties that he felt bound much of humanity, Thoreau reaped from the land both physically and mentally, and pursued truth in the quiet of nature. In  Walden , he explains how separating oneself from the world of men can truly awaken the sleeping self. Thoreau holds fast to the notion that you have not truly existed until you adopt such a lifestyle – and only then can you reenter society, as an enlightened being.

These simple but profound musings – as well as “Civil Disobedience,” his protest against the government’s interference with civil liberty – have inspired many to embrace his philosophy of individualism and love of nature. More than a century and a half later, his message is more timely than ever.

The Journal of Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau’s  Journal was his life’s work: the daily practice of writing that accompanied his daily walks, the workshop where he developed his books and essays, and a project in its own right – one of the most intensive explorations ever made of the everyday environment, the revolving seasons, and the changing self. It is a treasure trove of some of the finest prose in English and, for those acquainted with it, its prismatic pages exercise a hypnotic fascination. Yet at roughly seven thousand pages, or two million words, it remains Thoreau’s least-known work.

Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind by Robert D. Richardson, Jr.

The two years Thoreau spent at Walden Pond and the night he spent in the Concord jail are among the most familiar features of the American intellectual landscape. In this new biography, based on a reexamination of Thoreau’s manuscripts and on a retracing of his trips, Robert Richardson offers a view of Thoreau’s life and achievement in their full nineteenth-century context.

The Transcendentalists and Their World by Robert A. Gross

The Transcendentalists and Their World  offers a fresh view of the thinkers whose outsize impact on philosophy and literature would spread from tiny Concord to all corners of the earth. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Alcotts called this New England town home, and Thoreau drew on its life extensively in his classic  Walden . But Concord from the 1820s through the 1840s was no pastoral place fit for poets and philosophers.

This gem among books on Henry David Thoreau and his environment is an intimate journey into the life of a community and a searching cultural study of major American writers as they plumbed the depths of the universe for spiritual truths and surveyed the rapidly changing contours of their own neighborhoods. It shows us familiar figures in American literature alongside their neighbors at every level of the social order, and it reveals how this common life in Concord entered powerfully into their works. No American community of the nineteenth century has been recovered so richly and with so acute an awareness of its place in the larger American story.

Six Walks by Ben Shattuck

On an autumn morning in 1849, Henry David Thoreau stepped out his front door to walk the beaches of Cape Cod. Over a century and a half later, Ben Shattuck does the same. With little more than a loaf of bread, brick of cheese, and a notebook, Shattuck sets out to retrace Thoreau’s path through the Cape’s outer beaches, from the elbow to Provincetown’s fingertip.

This is the first of six journeys taken by Shattuck, each one inspired by a walk once taken by Henry David Thoreau. After the Cape, Shattuck goes up Mount Katahdin and Mount Wachusett, down the coastline of his hometown, and then through the Allagash. Along the way, Shattuck encounters unexpected characters, landscapes, and stories, seeing for himself the restorative effects that walking can have on a dampened spirit.

Over years of following Thoreau, Shattuck finds himself uncovering new insights about family, love, friendship, and fatherhood, and understanding more deeply the lessons walking can offer through life’s changing seasons.

If you enjoyed this guide to essential books on Henry David Thoreau, check out our list of The 10 Best Books on Ralph Waldo Emerson !

Poems & Poets

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau is recognized as an important contributor to the American literary and philosophical movement known as New England transcendentalism. His essays, books, and poems weave together two central themes over the course of his intellectual career: nature and the conduct of life. The continuing importance of these two themes is well illustrated by the fact that the last two essays Thoreau published during his lifetime were “The Last Days of John Brown” and “The Succession of Forest Trees” (both in 1860). In his moral and political work Thoreau aligned himself with the post-Socratic schools of Greek philosophy—in particular, the Cynics and Stoics—that used philosophy as a means of addressing ordinary human experience. His naturalistic writing integrated straightforward observation and cataloguing with transcendentalist interpretations of nature and the wilderness. In many of his works Thoreau brought these interpretations of nature to bear on how people live or ought to live.

Thoreau’s importance as a philosophical writer was little appreciated during his lifetime, but his two most noted works, Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854) and “Civil Disobedience” (1849), gradually developed a following, and by the latter half of the 20th century, had become classic texts in American thought. Not only have these texts been used widely to address issues in political philosophy, moral theory, and, more recently, environmentalism, but they have also been of central importance to those who see philosophy as an engagement with ordinary experience and not as an abstract deductive exercise. In this vein, Thoreau’s work has been recognized as having foreshadowed central insights of later philosophical movements such as existentialism and pragmatism.

Toward the end of his life Thoreau’s naturalistic interests took a more scientific turn; he pursued a close examination of local fauna and kept detailed records of his observations. Nevertheless, he kept one eye on the moral and political developments of his time, often expressing his positions with rhetorical fire as in his “A Plea for Captain John Brown” (1860). He achieved an elegant integration of his naturalism and his moral interests in several late essays that were published posthumously, among them “Walking” and “Wild Apples” (both in 1862).

David Henry Thoreau was born on July 12, 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts, to John and Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau. He had two older siblings, Helen and John, and a younger sister, Sophia. The family moved to Chelmsford in 1818, to Boston in 1821, and back to Concord in 1823. Thoreau had two educations in Concord. The first occurred through his explorations of the local environment, which were encouraged by his mother’s interest in nature. The second was his preparation at Concord Academy for study at Harvard University. He entered Harvard in 1833 and graduated in 1837. The year he graduated he began the journal that was a primary source for his lectures and published work throughout his life. At this time, too, he inverted his names and began to refer to himself as Henry David.

Thoreau’s working life began with a teaching job at Concord Center School that lasted only a few weeks because he was unwilling to use corporal punishment on his students. He and his brother, John, ran their own school from 1838 to 1841; their teaching techniques foreshadowed the pragmatic educational philosophy of John Dewey. During these years Thoreau developed a close relationship with Ralph Waldo Emerson , who served as his friend and mentor. Traces of Emerson’s philosophical influence appear in all of Thoreau’s writings, even after their friendship cooled.

In 1839 Thoreau met Ellen Sewall, the daughter of a Unitarian minister. At least partly on her father’s advice, she rejected Thoreau’s proposal of marriage. Thoreau’s writing career was launched the following year when he began publishing essays and poems in Emerson and Margaret Fuller ’s new journal, The Dial , which became the home of much transcendentalist writing. In July 1842 Thoreau published in The Dial “Natural History of Massachusetts,” which established the basic direction and style of his naturalistic writings. The essay displays both his scientific interest and his transcendentalist vision of the meanings to be found in human encounters with nature. In two essays published in 1843, “A Winter Walk” and “A Walk to Wachusett,” Thoreau develops his naturalistic writing in the direction it later took in Walden . Although these early essays can be read as somewhat romantic literary descriptions, Thoreau has already begun to inject a philosophical edge into his writings. Walking becomes a metaphor for various other features of human existence. Also, nature’s presence is not merely accepted passively; Thoreau focuses on its agency as an analogue and inspiration for human agency. Like other transcendentalists, he was an idealist and believed divinity to be immanent in nature. This indwelling of the divine, he thought, allows nature to serve as a vehicle for human insight. Consequently, the central issue at stake in many of his early nature essays is the awakening of humans to their own powers and possibilities through encounters with nature.

Thoreau worked off and on at his father’s pencil-making business, and in 1843 he served for a short time as tutor for Emerson’s brother Edward’s children on Staten Island, New York. Then, in 1845, he built a small cabin near Walden Pond on land that Ralph Waldo Emerson had purchased to preserve its beauty. During his two-year stay at the pond Thoreau completed the manuscript for A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849); it was based on a trip he had taken with his brother, John, in 1839 and was intended as a memorial to John, who had died of tetanus in 1842. Thoreau also, of course, had the experiences that became the basis for Walden , and he began writing this work while he was still living at the pond. Also during his sojourn at Walden Pond, Thoreau spent a night in jail for not having paid his poll tax in protest of slavery. This episode laid the foundation for “Civil Disobedience.”

After leaving Walden, Thoreau spent a year living in Emerson’s home, helping with handiwork and the children while Emerson was lecturing in Europe. In January 1848 he gave a two-part lecture at the Concord Lyceum titled “The Relation of the Individual to the State.” The lecture was published in revised form as “Resistance to Civil Government” in Elizabeth Peabody’s Aesthetic Papers in May 1849. Later retitled “Civil Disobedience,” it became his best-known and most influential essay.

In “Resistance to Civil Government” Thoreau works out his conception of the self-reliant individual’s relationship to the state. The essay begins with an idealistic transcendentalist hope for a government “which governs not at all.” But it quickly takes a practical turn, asking what one can do—and what one ought to do—when the state acts in a systematically immoral way. Thoreau’s immediate target is state-supported slavery in the United States. He chides his fellow citizens for directly and indirectly enabling slavery to continue in the Southern states, and he suggests that they find ways to act in resistance to the government on this score. He offers as one example of resistance the route that he and others had already taken of not paying taxes that might be used to sustain slavery. He also argues that economic support for slave states should be abandoned, even if it hurt commerce in the North. His suggestion that one can resist a government without resorting to violence gave the essay its notoriety; Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. cited it as an influence on their own acts of resistance. Thoreau’s argument in “Civil Disobedience” is sometimes read as a libertarian tract, like Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” (1841). From this point of view it is considered a defense of rugged individualism, if not anarchy. But such interpretations miss the central transcendentalism of the piece. What both Thoreau and Emerson require is a careful turning to one’s moral intuition, or conscience, as a guide when confronted by issues of major consequence. The aim is not to be left alone by the state to do as one pleases but to get the state, as well as oneself, to act in concert with human and divine conscience. In the same year “Resistance to Civil Government” appeared, Thoreau published his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). Thoreau attempts in the work to bring together his observations of nature with his commentary on human existence, but the book lacks the integrity of his best essays as the transcendentalist commentary remains separate and abstracted from the sections of narrative description. The commercial failure of the book undoubtedly helped Thoreau in his preparation of Walden . After the cool reception of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers , Thoreau traveled to Maine, Cape Cod, New Hampshire, and Canada. His excursions provided the material for future writing projects. He also continued to revise Walden ; it appeared in 1854, the second and last book Thoreau published during his lifetime. Walden is unquestionably Thoreau’s major work. He condenses the two years he had actually spent in the cabin into a single year, and, beginning with summer, takes the reader through the seasons at the pond. The central theme of the book is the cultivation of the self. Thoreau has in mind a specific audience: those who have become disenchanted with their everyday lives, “the mass of men who are discontented, and idly complaining of the hardness of their lot or of the times.” His aim is not to have others imitate his move to Walden but to have them consider their own possibilities for improving their situations, for overcoming their “lives of quiet desperation.” To this extent the book is like a Stoic treatise on life. It is, however, replete with irony, humor, and a philosophical and literary integrity that make it much more than a straightforward enchiridion.

To bring readers to their own awakenings, Thoreau first raises the question of a life’s economy. He experiments with living “deliberately,” paying attention to what he owns and what owns him, as well as to how he spends his time. An explicit anti-materialism underwrites much of the first two chapters. Thoreau does not dogmatically endorse an economic minimalism, however; the experiment in poverty is an attempt to find out what is important in a life—it is, in other words, a way of testing one’s life. The post-Socratic theme is that simplifying one’s life frees one to see more clearly. One will better perceive the world around one, will see what constrains one’s life, and, most important, will be freer to explore one’s inner self for divine insight. Because Thoreau sees himself as having been engaged in an experiment in living, leaving Walden is not a problem for or a contradiction of his philosophical outlook. When the experiment comes to an end, he looks forward without concern: “Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn.”

Thoreau seeks in Walden and many of his other writings to effect an awakening in a variety of ways. Nature plays a central role in most of these writings. On the one hand, it serves as a mirror and metaphor of human existence. It reflects the way one lives and provides exemplars of how one might live. In chapters such as “Brute Neighbors,” “Sounds,” and “Solitude,” Thoreau asks his reader to attend to what is immediately present in nature: the actions of birds and chipmunks, the sounds of night and morning, silences both inner and outer. The effect is twofold: the reader learns from this attentiveness what he or she has not before perceived, and, more important, in the process Thoreau slows down the reader’s world so that he or she might understand what it would be like to undertake his or her own experiment in attentiveness.

Nature also provides a metaphor for human growth. As many commentators have pointed out, the seasons of the text reveal the continuing possibilities for self-cultivation; one need not accept any routinized existence as final. Moreover, throughout the work Thoreau treats the reader to shifting focuses on morning, afternoon, and evening, revealing the possibilities of organic development even in short spans of existence. In attending to nature’s inner energies for self-recovery, one begins to notice one’s own possibilities for the same. This notion is good transcendentalist doctrine: nature is a vehicle for and catalyst of self-reliance. It is a source of intuitions of “higher laws.”

Finally, in a more practical vein, nature as wilderness provides an extreme against which one may measure one’s own aliveness. Thoreau sees his time at Walden as a “border” life between the numbing overcivilization of the town and a freer existence in the wilderness. The border life, he suggests, is fruitful precisely because it allows one to grow, to participate in the re-civilizing of one’s own life. As in his earlier essays, he focuses on championing human agency and creativity. This theme of the wilderness becomes even more explicit in later essays.

In philosophical terms—terms that Thoreau did not himself use—Thoreau’s transcendentalism is fundamentally idealistic, with “higher laws” serving as the measure of human endeavors. But it is at the same time a philosophy of nature, though not a reductive naturalism. For Thoreau, Emerson’s self-reliance needs nature’s inspiration, example, and effects. To undertake the task of self-cultivation one must, as Thoreau sees it, work with and through nature. Thoreau’s focus on nature brings him closer than most of his transcendentalist colleagues to the later philosophy of pragmatism. His idealism is not the remote operation of mind in the world but the working of higher laws into one’s own private thoughts and public practices. This position is his generic answer to lives of quiet desperation.

The return of the runaway Anthony Burns to slavery by the state of Massachusetts under the federal Fugitive Slave Law pushed Thoreau to take an even stronger stance than he had in “Civil Disobedience.” He expanded his ideas from that essay into “Slavery in Massachusetts,” which appeared in the abolitionist magazine The Liberator the same year Walden was published. His attack is now not merely on slavery in general but on his own state’s complicity with an immoral law. Thoreau retains his transcendentalist plea that one trust one’s inner conscience to judge the state’s actions, but he moves much closer to advocating the destruction of a state that engages in practices such as slavery. Though he does not openly propose violent action, he seems more amenable to it than he had in “Civil Disobedience.”

“Slavery in Massachusetts” was followed by three essays on the radical abolitionist John Brown. Thoreau presented the first, “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” in Concord on October 30, 1859, after Brown’s raid on the government arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (today West Virginia). It is primarily offered as a response to the negative press that Brown received for his efforts. The argument behind the defense of Brown is, however, clearly transcendentalist. Thoreau lauds Brown as a man of principle, as one who resisted his government’s institution of slavery as a matter of conscience; he represents what Thoreau called “a majority of one” in “Civil Disobedience.” In “Martyrdom of John Brown” and “The Last Days of John Brown,” written for separate memorial services for Brown held on December 2, 1859, the day Brown was hanged, Thoreau develops his portrayal of Brown as a self-reliant man of principle. These essays exemplify Thoreau’s perennial claim that a philosopher is not merely a schoolteacher, a professor, a scholar, or a minister but an agent for practical good. In this respect Thoreau again foreshadows pragmatic philosophy, especially the political and social involvement of Dewey. This feature of Thoreau’s outlook needs to be emphasized, because many readers of Walden and Thoreau’s nature essays are tempted to see him as a recluse.

Thoreau’s nature study became more scientifically serious and less transcendentalist in his later works. “The Succession of Forest Trees,” which he delivered as a lecture to the Middlesex Agricultural Society on September 20, 1860 and published in the New York Weekly Tribune , marks this turn in Thoreau’s career. Like many others, he had purchased and read Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection; or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life when it was published in 1859. This book, together with other readings in forestry and natural history, provided the basis for the new studies. “The Succession of Forest Trees” still bears the mark of Thoreau’s character; it is written with the usual irony and humor. Nevertheless, it deals seriously with seed dispersal and the growth of Northeastern forests. Its systematic philosophical import is to be found in Thoreau’s continued emphasis on a cosmos of growth, cultivation, and change. Nature again establishes the basis by which human beings must gauge their own lives.

During much of the last third of his life Thoreau earned his living by helping in the family business and by working as a surveyor. His surveying provided ample opportunity to continue his studies of nature. But these years were marred by recurring bouts of tuberculosis, a disease common to the time and to Thoreau’s family. In 1861 Thoreau suffered a difficult bout with the disease, and it was suggested that he travel as a treatment. He went west to Minnesota by boat and train. He returned home as sick as when he left.

By early 1862 Thoreau seemed to know that he was dying. He continued to work on his scientific studies, but with the help of his sister Sophia he also prepared several essays for publication in The Atlantic Monthly . They are among the best of his writings, and because they had been given as talks in the 1850s, they display a mature version of his transcendentalism. They include “Life without Principle,” “Walking,” and “Wild Apples,” all of which were published posthumously. In each, the self is treated as an agent in transition seeking ways to cultivate itself and learning to grow. There is no fixed Cartesian ego, only a questing “Walker, Errant,” as he puts it in “Walking.” The quest is itself motivated by a hope of discovering “higher laws” and of learning to live through them, of finding a practical wisdom. In “Life without Principle” Thoreau considers the Gold Rush and remarks that “a grain of gold will gild a great surface, but not so much as a grain of wisdom.”

In these late essays the themes of Walden return, but they are now expressed with the strength and poetic insight of a man facing death. Thoreau again focuses on how people might remain awake and alive when their daily “business” so often leads them toward sleep and living death—toward lives of quiet desperation. In each of the essays nature resides in the background as a measure of what humans do. Thoreau’s transcendentalist idealism is ever present, though seldom stated. The world is a world of truth and moral force; the individual’s task is to awaken to that truth and bring it to bear on people’s lives. This life of principle might be found in the moral energy of a John Brown, in the poetic insight of a Ralph Waldo Emerson, or in the living of a simple if unnoticed life. For Thoreau, any of these might be a philosophical life in his sense; philosophy, for him, is not a project of reclusive understanding and scholarship. His anti-materialism, his focus on nature’s wildness, his emphasis on transition and the novelty of each day and season are all instrumental in bringing people to themselves and in finding ways to live sincere lives. As he states in “Life without Principle,” there is no “such thing as wisdom not applied to life.”

That Thoreau took his own philosophical journey seriously was exemplified several days before he died. An old friend, knowing that Thoreau was close to death, asked if he had any sense of what was to come. Thoreau’s famous reply was, “One world at a time.” He died on May 6, 1862.

Thoreau was a philosophical provocateur. He had a sense of philosophical system derived from the transcendentalist movement and its various German and British influences. But he was neither an analytic philosopher nor an idealist system builder. He saw the practical import of the transcendentalist movement and staked his claim there. He was a harbinger of the social, political, and poetical dimensions of American pragmatism, and his work did, indeed, become practically useful in the 20th century. The influence of “Civil Disobedience” on Gandhi and King are the most notable instances, but they are not the only ones. Selective reading of Walden and of various of the nature essays has identified a dimension of Thoreau’s thinking that helps underwrite environmentalism; for Thoreau the importance of wilderness was both metaphorical and actual. Moreover, in his responses to overreliance on technology and wealth as cures for the human condition, one sees hints of the ideas of Martin Heidegger and other existentialists. Thoreau’s place in American philosophy is only now being given serious consideration; it seems likely that his influence will continue to flourish.

• North America
• U.S., New England

Thoreau's Life

Thoreau’s life.

by Richard J. Schneider     

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was born and lived nearly all his life in Concord, Massachusetts, a small town about twenty miles west of Boston. He received his education at the public school in Concord and at the private Concord Academy. Proving to be a better scholar than his more fun-loving and popular elder brother John, he was sent to Harvard. He did well there and, despite having to drop out for several months for financial and health reasons, was graduated in the top half of his class in 1837.

Thoreau’s graduation came at an inauspicious time. In 1837, America was experiencing an economic depression and jobs were not plentiful. Furthermore, Thoreau found himself temperamentally unsuited for three of the four usual professions open to Harvard graduates: the ministry, the law, and medicine. The fourth, teaching, was one he felt comfortable with, since both of his elder siblings, Helen and John, were already teachers. He was hired as the teacher of the Concord public school, but resigned after only two weeks because of a dispute with his superintendent over how to discipline the children. For a while he and John considered seeking their fortunes in Kentucky, but at last he fell back onto working in his father’s pencil factory.

Thoreau’s family participated in the “quiet desperation” of commerce and industry through the pencil factory owned and managed by his father. Thoreau family pencils, produced behind the family house on Main Street, were generally recognized as America’s best pencils, largely because of Henry’s research into German pencil-making techniques.

In 1838, he decided to start his own school in Concord, eventually asking John to help him. The two brothers worked well together and vacationed together during holidays. In September 1839, they spent a memorable week together on a boating trip up the Concord and Merrimack rivers to Mount Washington in New Hampshire. About the same time both brothers became romantically interested in Ellen Sewall, a frequent visitor to Concord from Cape Cod. In the fall of the next year, both brothers — first John and then Henry — proposed marriage to her. But because of her father’s objections to the Thoreaus’ liberal religious views, Ellen rejected both proposals.

When John endured a lengthy illness in 1841, the school became too much for Henry to handle alone, so he closed it. He returned to work in the pencil factory but was soon invited to work as a live-in handyman in the home of his mentor, neighbor, and friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Emerson was by then already one of the most famous American philosophers and men of letters. Since Thoreau’s graduation from Harvard, he had become a protégé of his famous neighbor and an informal student of Emerson’s Transcendental ideas. Transcendentalism was an American version of Romantic Idealism, a dualistic Neoplatonic view of the world divided into the material and the spiritual. For Emerson, “Mind is the only reality, of which all other natures are better or worse reflectors. Nature, literature, history, are only subjective phenomena.” For the Transcendentalist, the secret of successful living was to hold oneself above material concerns as much as possible and focus on the spiritual. Thoreau must have imbibed Transcendentalism through almost every pore during his two years living with Emerson, though he would modify it to suit his own temperament by granting nature more reality than Emerson did.

During his stay with Emerson, Thoreau developed ambitions of becoming a writer and got help from Emerson in getting some poems and essays published in the Transcendental journal, The Dial . But life in his parents’ home held problems for the budding writer. Work in the pencil factory was tedious and tiring, and, since his mother took in boarders, there was little quiet or privacy in the house. Remembering a summer visit to the retreat cabin of college friend Charles Stearns Wheeler, Thoreau developed a plan to build such a house for himself where he could find privacy to write.

In 1845, he received permission from Emerson to use a piece of land that Emerson owned on the shore of Walden Pond. He bought building supplies and a chicken coop (for the boards), and built himself a small house there, moving in on the Fourth of July. He had two main purposes in moving to the pond: to write his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers , as a tribute to his late brother John; and to conduct an economic experiment to see if it were possible to live by working one day and devoting the other six to more Transcendental concerns, thus reversing the Yankee habit of working six days and resting one. His nature study and the writing of Walden would develop later during his stay at the pond. He began writing Walden in 1846 as a lecture in response to the questions of townspeople who were curious about what he was doing out at the pond, but his notes soon grew into his second book.

Thoreau stayed in the house at Walden Pond for two years, from July 1845 to September 1847. Walden condenses the experiences of those two years into one year for artistic unity. During these two years he also spent one night in jail, an incident which occurred in the summer of 1846 and which became the subject of his essay “Resistance to Civil Government” (later known as “Civil Disobedience”). That same year he also took a trip to Maine to see and climb Mount Katahdin, a place with a much wilder nature than he could find around Concord.

In the years after leaving Walden Pond, Thoreau published A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and Walden (1854). A Week sold poorly, leading Thoreau to hold off publication of Walden , so that he could revise it extensively to avoid the problems, such as looseness of structure and a preaching tone unalleviated by humor, that had put readers off in the first book.  Walden was a modest success: it brought Thoreau good reviews, satisfactory sales, and a small following of fans.

Thoreau returned to the Emerson home and lived there for two years, while Emerson was on a lecture tour in Europe. For much of his remaining years, he rented a room in his parents’ home. He made his living by working in the pencil factory, by doing surveying, by lecturing occasionally, and by publishing essays in newspapers and journals. His income, however, was always very modest, and his main concerns were his daily afternoon walks in the Concord woods, the keeping of a private journal of his nature observations and ideas, and the writing and revision of essays for publication.

Thoreau was an ardent and outspoken abolitionist, serving as a conductor on the underground railroad to help escaped slaves make their way to Canada.  He wrote strongly-worded attacks on the Fugitive Slave Law (“Slavery in Massachusetts”) and on the execution of John Brown.

His trips to the Maine woods and to Cape Cod provided material for travel essays published first in journals; these were eventually collected into posthumous books. Other excursions took him to Canada and, near the end of his life, to Minnesota.

In May 1862, Thoreau died of the tuberculosis with which he had been periodically plagued since his college years. He left behind large unfinished projects, including a comprehensive record of natural phenomena around Concord, extensive notes on American Indians, and many volumes of his daily journal jottings. At his funeral, his friend Emerson said, “The country knows not yet, or in the least part, how great a son it has lost. … His soul was made for the noblest society; he had in a short life exhausted the capabilities of this world; wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a home.”

Additional Biographies

Since his death in 1862, Thoreau and his work have inspired a steady stream of books, essays, paintings, and other works.  The biographies we most often recommend are:

Henry David Thoreau: A Life , by Laura Dassow Walls (University of Chicago Press, 2017).

Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind , by Robert D. Richardson, Jr. (University of California Press, 1986).

The Days of Henry Thoreau: A Biography , by Walter Harding (various editions).

Thoreau , by Henry Seidel Canby (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1939).

Thoreau in his Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Memoirs, and Interviews by Friends and Associates , edited by Sandra H. Petrulionis (Iowa City: Iowa University Press, 2012).

In addition to the extensive resources available on our site, other online resources include:

Mapping Thoreau Country: Tracking Thoreau’s Travels in Massachusetts

Special Collections at the Concord Free Public Library

The Thoreau Reader

The Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods

Family Tree of Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

Thoreau, david henry.

Thoreau, David Henry , b. July 12, 1817,  Concord, Middlesex Co., Mass.; writer, naturalist, philosopher, pencil maker, surveyor, Transcendentalist, inspector of snow storms; d. May 6, 1862, Concord, Middlesex Co., Mass.; bu. New Burying Ground, Concord, in the Dunbar family plot; moved with other family members to Author’s Ridge in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord (essentially, up the street) in the 1870s.  Changed name to Henry David on his own after he was graduated from Harvard.

Father : John Thoreau (1787-1858)

Mother : Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau (1787-1872)

Sister : Helen Thoreau (1812-1849)

Brother : John Thoreau, Jr. (1815-1842)

Sister : Sophia Thoreau (1819-1876)

Descended from:

Thoreau, jean.

Thoreau , Jean , b. St. Helier, Isle of Jersey, ca. 1754; emigrated to America in 1773; m. (1) Jane (Jennie) Burns in 1781 (d. 1796); m. (2) Rebecca Kettell in 1782; d. 1801. Anglicized name from Jean to John.

Burns, Jane (Jennie)

Burns, Jane (Jennie) , d. 1796.

Dunbar, Asa

Dunbar, Asa , b. May 26, 1745 Bridgewater, Mass.; attended Harvard; m. Mary Jones October 22, 1772, in Weston, Mass.; worked as a minister and then in the area of law and as the town clerk of Keene, N.H.; member of the Rising Sun Lodge No. 4 in Keene; d. June 22, 1787 with full Masonic honors.

Jones, Mary

Jones, Mary , b. July 11, 1748, in Weston, Mass., d. August 2, 1830.  Only grandparent HDT knew.  M. (2) 1798 Captain Jonas Minott and settled on his farm on Virginia Road, Concord.  He died 1813.

Thoreau, Philippe

Thoreau , Philippe , wine merchant, b. 1720; m. Marie le Gallais in 1749; had nine children; d. 1800.

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Henry David Thoreau   The Best 5 Books to Read

H enry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862) was an American writer, philosopher, and naturalist perhaps best known for exiling himself to a shack in the woods for two years in Concord, Massachusetts, and producing his famous 1854 book, Walden .

Why did he do so? Well, as he puts it:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Influenced by fellow philosopher, his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, who owned the portion of woodland in which Thoreau built his shack (see my list of Emerson’s best books here ), Thoreau set out to meditate on life, society, and the role of the individual. He wrote that:

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

Thoreau sought an antidote to this desperation. How can we live lives of freedom and purpose? How can we participate in society while maintaining our individuality? How can we live in a way that is true to ourselves?

Thoreau’s answers to these questions emphasized the importance of getting out into the natural world, and of our need to each establish meaning and purpose individually .

As the 19th-century Danish philosopher Kierkegaard also argues when discussing the meaning of life , we will not find fulfillment in objectivity or conformity, Thoreau thinks; we must maintain our subjectivity, acknowledge our individuality, and answer the questions life poses for ourselves .

Thoreau’s work greatly informed Transcendentalism , a 19th-century philosophical movement spearheaded by Emerson and Margaret Fuller that believes in the inherent goodness — even divinity — of nature and humanity.

Within this picture, Transcendentalists see society as a corrupting force, as a conspiracy against individuality.

They believe — as set out with masterful prose in Emerson’s famous essay on self-reliance — that we are at our best when we are left to our own devices in nature, when we are self-reliant ; and that cooperation and morality come naturally, and need not be legislated by the state.

If the practices of the state come into conflict with our own conscience, Transcendentalists thus advise us to prioritize the needs of our own conscience.

And, as we discuss below, in his 1849 essay Civil Disobedience , Thoreau presents his hugely influential framework for how we might do so: by maintaining our individual dignity while protesting against the state in non-violent fashion.

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Though he confronts some of the most difficult aspects of the human condition, Thoreau’s prose contains a powerful clarity of thought that few have matched before or since.

This reading list attempts to capture that clarity of thought by presenting the best books on and by Henry David Thoreau.

After reading some of the books on this list, you’ll understand why this great American writer has been so influential over the last 150 years, and why his work continues to be celebrated today.

Let’s dive in!

1. Walden, by Henry David Thoreau

BY HENRY DAVID THOREAU

Of course, where better to start?

Thoreau originally went to Walden Pond to write his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers , in memory of his brother, who passed away very young, and to whom Thoreau was very close.

The book we now know and love as Walden emerges from Thoreau’s initial journal entries upon arriving in the woods.

Though he was not totally isolated during the two years he spent at Walden Pond — he received visitors, and went home for Sunday dinners — Thoreau created enough space between himself and civilization to expertly dissect the extent to which conformity infects our individuality.

It is this incisive dissection that imbues Walden with its power: Thoreau meditates beautifully on the power of the natural world, his role within it, and the nefarious ways in which society and the accumulation of wealth alienates us from nature, each other, and ourselves.

If you’re looking for an insight into Thoreau’s Transcendentalist, naturalist, beautiful view on the world, Walden is the perfect gateway, and belongs on your bookshelf.

2. Civil Disobedience, by Henry David Thoreau

Civil Disobedience

Fueled by his outrage at slavery and the American-Mexican war, Thoreau’s essay Civil Disobedience calls for all citizens to value their own conscience above anything legislated by law, and has been highly influential since its publication in 1849.

Thoreau was aghast that his tax dollars were being used to fund activities — slavery and war — that he vehemently disagreed with.

Unable to square his financial contribution with his own conscience, he thus stopped paying his taxes, and spent time in prison for doing so.

For Thoreau, going to prison was a better outcome — a freer outcome — than acting against his own conscience.

This episode in Thoreau’s life is a prime example of the non-violent protest he champions throughout Civil Disobedience , and his method inspired later figures like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

Civil Disobedience begins with the famous statement,

That government is best which governs least.

But here Thoreau is actually quoting from the masthead of the libertarian publication U.S. Democratic Review .

He goes on to expand this position, not necessarily calling for no government, but calling for better government — he wants the government to focus on what it is good at, like building infrastructure, and not infiltrate the moral sphere.

For, in the realms of morality and living a good life, Thoreau argues, it is self-governance that must take precedence.

If you’re interested in how Thoreau reconciles his emphasis on individual autonomy with participation in collective society — and in reading an essay that has had huge political influence in the years since it was written — Civil Disobedience is for you.

3. The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, by Henry David Thoreau

The Journal of Henry David Thoreau

As we discussed above, Thoreau’s Walden emerged from his initial journal entries.

Fans of Walden , then: rejoice, for Thoreau kept a journal all his life — and the same strong narrative voice speaks from these pages.

We get an insight into Thoreau’s day-to-day existence (which involves a wonderful amount of walking in nature), his sensitivity to the beauty of the natural world, his passion for ecology and plantlife, and of course his nuanced insights into the ways in which society corrupts the purity of natural human life.

This edition of The Journal of Henry David Thoreau , edited by Damion Searls, condenses Thoreau’s original 15,000+ pages of journal entries into a single, 700-page volume.

With his selections, Searls does a fantastic job in giving an overall impression of Thoreau’s life and thought, and provides brilliant contextual analysis along the way.

While perhaps not the best starting point on this list, if you enjoy Walden , you’ll love The Journal of Henry David Thoreau .

4. The Portable Thoreau, by Henry David Thoreau

The Portable Thoreau

If you’re seeking a one-stop shop for Thoreau’s work, then look no further than The Portable Thoreau , an excellent collection of Thoreau’s best works, edited by Jeffrey S. Cramer.

The Portable Thoreau contains the full text of Walden , Civil Disobedience , as well as some of his most thoughtful and celebrated essays, including Walking , The Last Days of John Brown , and Life Without Principle .

It also contains extracts from his journal, as well as his books The Maine Woods , in which he recounts the interior and exterior discoveries from three separate visits, and Cape Cod , where he reports his reflections while walking along the Massachusetts coastline.

The Portable Thoreau also treats us to 18 of Thoreau’s poems, as well as a scholarly introduction, biographical sketch, and epilogue.

If you’re looking to get into Thoreau’s work, this edition is a great option.

5. Henry David Thoreau: A Life, by Laura Dassow Walls

Henry David Thoreau: A Life

BY LAURA DASSOW WALLS

If you’re looking to learn more about the life Thoreau lived and the events that shaped his work, Laura Dassow Walls’s Henry David Thoreau: A Life is a luminous biography, excellently researched and engagingly written.

Walls charts Thoreau’s fascinating life from cradle to grave, and provides exceptional contextual detail throughout — including the untimely death of his brother, his days as a Harvard student, his association with the Transcendentalism and intellectual circle of Ralph Waldo Emerson, his radical politics, his environmentalism, and what his brilliant prose says about America then and now.

Walls writes,

The Thoreau I sought was not in any book, so I wrote this one.

Indeed, Henry David Thoreau: A Life is a masterly tribute to the life and work of one of America’s greatest thinkers.

If you like Thoreau, this brilliant biography will only enrich and deepen your appreciation of his work.

Further reading

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Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was an American philosopher, poet, and environmental scientist whose major work, Walden , draws upon each of these identities in meditating on the concrete problems of living in the world as a human being. He sought to revive a conception of philosophy as a way of life, not only a mode of reflective thought and discourse. Thoreau's work was informed by an eclectic variety of sources. He was well-versed in classical Greek and Roman philosophy, ranging from the pre-Socratics through the Hellenistic schools, and was also an avid student of the ancient scriptures and wisdom literature of various Asian traditions. He was familiar with modern philosophy ranging from Descartes, Locke and the Cambridge Platonists through Emerson, Coleridge, and the German Idealists, all of whom are influential on Thoreau's philosophy. He discussed his own scientific findings with leading naturalists of the day, and read the latest work of Humboldt and Darwin with interest and admiration. His philosophical explorations of self and world led him to develop an epistemology of embodied perception and a non-dualistic account of mental and material life. In addition to his focus on ethics in an existential spirit, Thoreau also makes unique contributions to ontology, the philosophy of science, and radical political thought. Although his political essays have become justly famous, his works on natural science were not even published until the late twentieth century, and they help to give us a more complete picture of him as a thinker. Among the texts he left unfinished was a set of manuscript volumes filled with information on Native American religion and culture. Thoreau's work anticipates certain later developments in pragmatism, phenomenology, and environmental philosophy, and poses a perennially valuable challenge to our conception of the methods and intentions of philosophy itself.

1. Life and Writings

2. nature and human existence, 3. the ethics of perception, 4. friendship and politics, 5. locating thoreau, bibliography, other internet resources, related entries.

Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1817 and died there in 1862, at the age of forty-four. Like that of his near-contemporary Søren Kierkegaard, Thoreau's intellectual career unfolded in a close and polemical relation to the town in which he spent most of his life. After graduating from Harvard in 1837, he struck up a friendship with fellow Concord resident Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose essay “Nature” he had first encountered earlier that year. Although the two American thinkers had a turbulent relationship due to serious philosophical and personal differences, they had a profound and lasting effect upon one another. It was in the fall of 1837 that Thoreau, aged twenty, made his first entries in the multivolume journal he would keep for the rest of his life. Most of his published writings were developed from notes that first appeared on these pages, and Thoreau subsequently revised many entries, so his journal can be considered a finished work in itself. During his lifetime he published only two books, along with numerous shorter essays that were first delivered as lectures. He lived a simple and relatively quiet life, making his living briefly as a teacher and pencil maker but mostly as a land surveyor. Thoreau had intimate bonds with his family and friends, and remained unmarried although he was deeply in love at least twice. His first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers , was still a work in progress in 1845, when he went to live in the woods by Walden Pond for two years. This “experiment” in living on the outskirts of town was an intensive time of examination for Thoreau, as he drew close to nature and contemplated the final ends of his own life, which was otherwise at risk of ending in quiet desperation. Thoreau viewed his existential quest as a venture in philosophy, in the ancient Greek sense of the word, because it was motivated by an urgent need to find a reflective understanding of reality that could inform a life of wisdom.

His experience bore fruit in the 1854 publication of his literary masterpiece Walden , a work that almost defies categorization: it is a work of narrative prose which often soars to poetic heights, combining philosophical speculation with close observation of a concrete place. It is a rousing summons to the examined life and to the realization of one's potential, while at the same time it develops what might be described as a religious vision of the human being and the universe. Walden has been admired by a larger world audience than any other book written by an American author, and—whether or not it ought to be called a work of philosophy—it contains a substantial amount of philosophical content, which deserves to be better appreciated than it has been. Stanley Cavell has argued that Thoreau is an embarrassment to “what we have learned to call philosophy,” since his work embodies “a mode of conceptual accuracy” that is “based on an idea of rigor” foreign to the academic establishment (Cavell 1988, 14). One of the difficulties in coming to terms with Thoreau is that his philosophy, like Nietzsche's, has the character of “a system in aphorisms,” whose form is entirely appropriate to their content (Löwith 1997, 11). The challenge to the reader is to see the coherence of the whole philosophical outlook that is articulated in so many pithy fragments. Accordingly, this entry attempts to sort out and delineate the main themes of Thoreau's project, in the hope of serving as an aid and stimulus to further study. It draws upon Thoreau's entire corpus, including the works he left in manuscript which were published after his death.

In his essay “Nature,” Emerson asserts that there can be found in the natural world “a sanctity which shames our religions.” Thoreau would agree completely with this statement. But in the same essay Emerson also inclines toward Platonism, claiming that nature is “emblematic” of higher truths, and suggesting that the material world has value by virtue of being a subsidiary product of mental reality: each natural object is therefore “a symbol of some spiritual fact.” For the most part, Thoreau recoils from the idea that we could find some kind of higher reality by looking beyond nature: in the “Friday” chapter of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers , he asks: “Is not Nature, rightly read, that of which she is commonly taken to be the symbol merely?” As he sees it, the realm of spirit is the physical world, which has a sacred meaning that can be directly perceived. Accordingly, he seeks “to be always on the alert to find God in nature” ( Journal , 9/7/51), and to hear “the language which all things and events speak without metaphor” ( Walden , IV). Thoreau's metaphysical convictions compel him to “defend nature's intrinsic value and to explore immanent conceptions of deity—positions far removed from Emerson and most transcendentalists” (Cafaro 2004, 132–133).

To say that nature is inherently significant is to say that natural facts are neither inert nor value-free. Thoreau urges his reader not to “underrate the value of a fact,” since each concrete detail of the world may contain a meaningful truth (“Natural History of Massachusetts”). Note the phrase: the value of a fact . Thoreau does not distinguish between facts and values, or between primary and secondary qualities, since he understands the universe as an organic whole in which mind and matter are inseparable. When we perceive sights, sounds, and textures, we are not standing as disembodied consciousness apart from a world of inanimate mechanisms; rather, we are sentient beings immersed in the sensory world, learning the “essential facts of life” only through “the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us” ( Walden , II). The philosopher who seeks knowledge through experience should therefore not be surprised to discover beauty and order in natural phenomena. However, these axiological properties are not introduced from without, from the top down—rather, they emerge from within the various self-maintaining processes of organic life. And the entire environment, the “living earth” itself, has something like a life of its own, containing but not reducible to the biotic existence of animals and plants ( Walden , XVII). This is what he elsewhere describes as the “slumbering subterranean fire in nature which never goes out” (“A Winter Walk”).

Thoreau remarks upon the “much grander significance” of any natural phenomenon “when not referred to man and his needs but viewed absolutely” ( Journal , 11/10/51). The world is rich with value that is not of our making, and “whatever we have perceived to be in the slightest degree beautiful is of infinitely more value to us than what we have only as yet discovered to be useful and to serve our purpose” ( Faith in a Seed , 144). It is when we are not guilty of imposing our own purposes onto the world that we are able to view it on its own terms. One of the things we then discover is that we are involved in a pluralistic universe, containing many different points of view other than our own. And when we begin to realize “the infinite extent of our relations” ( Walden , VIII), we can see that even what does not at first seem to be good for us may have some positive value when considered from a broader perspective. Rather than dismissing squirrels as rodents, for instance, we should see them as “planters of forests,” and be grateful for the role they play in the distribution of seeds ( Journal , 10/22/60). Likewise, the “gentle rain which waters my beans and keeps me in the house to-day is not drear and melancholy, but good for me too. Though it prevents my hoeing them, it is of far more worth than my hoeing. If it should continue so long as to cause the seeds to rot in the ground and destroy the potatoes in the low lands, it would still be good for the grass on the uplands, and, being good for the grass, it would be good for me” ( Walden , V). Our limited view often keeps us from appreciating the harmonious interdependence of all parts of the natural world: this is not due to “any confusion or irregularity in Nature,” but because of our own incomplete knowledge ( Walden , XVI). Thoreau declares that he would be happy “if all the meadows on the earth were left in a wild state,” since in tampering with nature we know not what we do and sometimes end up doing harm as a result ( Walden , X). In many cases we find that “unhandselled nature is worth more even by our modes of valuation than our improvements are” ( Journal , 11/10/60).

In nature we have access to real value, which can be used as a standard against which to measure our conventional evaluations. An example of the latter is the value that is “arbitrarily attached” to gold, which has nothing to do with its “intrinsic beauty or value” ( Journal , 10/13/60). So it is a mistake to rush to California “as if the true gold were to be found in that direction,” when one has failed to appreciate the inherent worth of one's native soil ( Journal , 10/18/55). In the economy of nature, a seed is more precious than a diamond, for it contains “the principle of growth, or life,” and has the ability to become a specific plant or tree ( Journal , 3/22/61). The seed not only provides evidence that nature is filled with “creative genius” ( Journal , 1/5/56), but it also reminds us that a spark of divinity is present in each human being as well. One of Thoreau's favorite analogies—not only a metaphor, as he sees it—is that between the ripening of a seed and the development of human potential. “The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling” ( Walden , I). What he calls “wildness” is not located only in the nonhuman world; the same creative force is also active in human nature, so that even a literary work of art can reasonably be praised as a manifestation of wildness (see “Walking”). There is “a perfect analogy between the life of the human being and that of the vegetable” ( Journal , 5/20/51), and thoughts “spring in man's brain” in just the same way that “a plant springs and grows by its own vitality” ( Journal , 11/8/50 & 4/3/58). Thoreau's exhortations to follow the promptings of one's genius are based on the idea that by obeying our own wild nature we are aligning ourselves with a sacred power. What inspires us to realize our highest potential is “the primitive vigor of Nature in us” ( Journal , 8/30/56), and this influence is something we are able neither to predict nor to comprehend: as he describes it in the “Ktaadn” chapter of The Maine Woods , nature is “primeval, untamed, and forever untamable,” a godlike force but not always a kind one.

Needless to say, Thoreau is not the type of idealist who encourages us to go around “rejecting the evidence of our senses” ( Walden , XIV). On the other hand, he has nothing but scorn for the sort of materialism that fails to penetrate the inner mystery of things, discovering “nothing but surface” in its mechanistic observations ( Journal , 3/7/59). Instead, we must approach the world as “nature looking into nature,” aware of the relation between the form of our own perception and what we are able to perceive ( Correspondence , 7/21/41). There are reasons for classifying Thoreau as both a naturalist and a romantic, although both of these categories are perhaps too broad to be very helpful. His conception of nature is informed by a syncretic appropriation of Greek, Roman, Indian, and other sources, and the result is an eclectic vision that is uniquely his own. For this reason it is difficult to situate Thoreau within the history of modern philosophy, but he might be described as articulating a version of transcendental idealism. If Thoreau is indeed “the American heir to Kant's critical philosophy,” as he has been called (Oelschlaeger 1991, 136), it is because his investigation of “the relation between the subject of knowledge and its object” builds upon a Kantian insight that Emerson, who viewed the senses as illusory, arguably did not grasp (see Cavell 1992, 94–95). In order to understand why this might be an accurate categorization, we must proceed from Thoreau's metaphysics to his epistemology.

If one were asked to name the cardinal virtue of Thoreau's philosophy, it would be hard to identify a better candidate than awareness . He attests to the importance of “being forever on the alert,” and of “the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen” ( Walden , IV). This exercise may enable one to create remarkably minute descriptions of a sunset, a battle between red and black ants, or the shapes taken by thawing clay on a sand bank: but its primary value lies in the way it affects the quality of our experience. “It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look” ( Walden , II). Awareness cannot be classified as exclusively a moral or an intellectual virtue, either, since knowing is an inescapably practical and evaluative activity. Thoreau has been interpreted as offering an original response to the major problem of modern philosophy, since he recognizes that knowledge is “dependent on the individual's ability to see,” and that “the world as known is thus radically dependent on character” (Tauber 2001, 4–5).

One of the common tenets of ancient philosophy which was abandoned in the period beginning with Descartes is that a person “could not have access to the truth” without undertaking a process of self-purification that would render him “susceptible to knowing the truth” (Foucault 1997, 278–279). For Thoreau, it was the work of a lifetime to cultivate one's receptivity to the beauty of the universe. Believing that “the perception of beauty is a moral test” ( Journal , 6/21/52), Thoreau frequently chastises himself or humanity in general for failing in this respect. “How much of beauty—of color, as well as form—on which our eyes daily rest goes unperceived by us,” he laments ( Journal , 8/1/60); and he worries that “Nature has no human inhabitant who appreciates her” ( Walden , IX). Noticing that his sensory awareness has grown less acute since the time of his youth, he speculates that “the child plucks its first flower with an insight into its beauty and significance which the subsequent botanist never retains” ( Journal , 7/16/51 & 2/5/52). In order to attain a clear and truthful view of things, we must refine all the perceptual faculties of our embodied consciousness, and become emotionally attuned to all the concrete features of the place in which we are located. We fully know only those facts that are “warm, moist, incarnated,” and palpably felt: “A man has not seen a thing who has not felt it” ( Journal , 2/23/60).

Since our ability to appreciate the significance of phenomena is so easily dulled, it requires a certain discipline in order to become and remain a reliable knower of the world. Like Aristotle, Thoreau believes that the perception of truth “produces a pleasurable sensation”; and he adds that a “healthy and refined nature would always derive pleasure from the landscape” ( Journal , 9/24/54 & 6/27/52). Nature will reward the most careful attention paid by a person who is appropriately disposed, but there is only “as much beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to appreciate,—not a grain more. The actual objects which one person will see from a particular hilltop are just as different from those which another will see as the persons are different” ( Journal , 11/4/58). One who is in the right state to be capable of giving a “poetic and lively description” of things will find himself “in a living and beautiful world” ( Journal , 10/13/60 & 12/31/59). Beauty, like color, does not lie only in the eye of the beholder: flowers, for example, are indeed beautiful and brightly colored. Nevertheless, beauty—and color, for that matter—can exist only where there is a beholder to perceive it ( Journal , 6/15/52 & 1/21/38). From his experience in the field making observations of natural phenomena, Thoreau gained the insight “that he, the supposedly neutral observer, was always and unavoidably in the center of the observation” (McGregor 1997, 113). Because all perception of objects has a subjective aspect, the world can be defined as a sphere centered around each conscious perceiver: wherever we are located, “the universe is built around us, and we are central still” ( Journal , 8/24/41). This does not mean that we are trapped inside of our own consciousness; rather, the point is that it is only through the lens of our own subjectivity that we have access to the external world.

What we are able to perceive, then, depends not only upon where we are physically situated: it is also contingent upon who we are and what we value, or how our attention is focused. “Objects are concealed from our view, not so much because they are out of the course of our visual ray as because we do not bring our minds and eyes to bear on them…. A man sees only what concerns him” (“Autumnal Tints”). In other words, there is “no such thing as pure objective observation. Your observation, to be interesting, i.e. to be significant, must be subjective ” ( Journal , 5/6/54). Subjectivity is not an obstacle to truth, according to Thoreau. After all, he says, “the truest description, and that by which another living man can most readily recognize a flower, is the unmeasured and eloquent one which the sight of it inspires” ( Journal , 10/13/60). A true account of the world must do justice to all the familiar properties of objects that the human mind is capable of perceiving. Whether this could be done by a scientific description is a vexing question for Thoreau, and one about which he shows considerable ambivalence. One of his concerns is that the scientist “discovers no world for the mind of man with all its faculties to inhabit”; by contrast, there is “more humanity” in “the unscientific man's knowledge,” since the latter can explain how certain facts pertain to life ( Journal , 9/5/51, 2/13/52). He accuses the naturalist of failing to understand color, much less beauty, and asks: “What sort of science is that which enriches the understanding, but robs the imagination?” ( Journal , 10/5/61 & 12/25/51)

Thoreau sometimes characterizes science as an ideal discipline that will enrich our knowledge and experience: “The true man of science will know nature better by his finer organization; he will smell, taste, see, hear, feel, better than other men. His will be a deeper and finer experience” (“Natural History of Massachusetts”). Yet he also gives voice to the fear that by weighing and measuring things and collecting quantitative data he may actually be narrowing his vision. The scientist “studies nature as a dead language,” and would rather study a dead fish preserved in a jar than a living one in its native element ( Journal , 5/10/53 & 11/30/58). In these same journal entries, Thoreau claims that he seeks to experience the significance of nature, and that “the beauty of the fish” is what is most worthy of being measured. On the other hand, when he finds a dead fish in the water, he brings it home to weigh and measure, covering several pages with his statistical findings ( Journal , 8/20/54). This is only one of many examples of Thoreau's fascination with data-gathering, and yet he repeatedly questions its value, as if he does not know what to make of his own penchant for naturalistic research. At the very least, scientific investigations run the risk of being “trivial and petty,” so perhaps what one should do is “learn science and then forget it” ( Journal , 1/21/53 & 4/22/52). But Thoreau is more deeply troubled by the possibility that “science is inhuman,” since objects “seen with a microscope begin to be insignificant,” and this is “not the means of acquiring true knowledge” ( Journal , 5/1/59 & 5/28/54). Overall, his position is not that a mystical or imaginative awareness of the world is incompatible with knowledge of measurable facts, but that an exclusive focus on the latter would blind us to whatever aspects of reality fall outside the scope of our measurement.

One thing we can learn from all of Thoreau's comments on scientific inquiry is that he cares very much about the following question: what can we know about the world, and how are we able to know it? Although he admires the precision of scientific information, he wonders if what it delivers is always bound to be “something less than the vague poetic” ( Journal , 1/5/50). In principle, a naturalistic approach to reality should be able to capture its beauty and significance; in practice, however, it may be “impossible for the same person to see things from the poet's point of view and that of the man of science” ( Journal , 2/18/52). In that case, the best we can do is try to convey our intimations of the truth about the universe, and be willing to err on the side of obscurity and excess: “I desire to speak somewhere without bounds; like a man in his waking moment, to men in their waking moments; for I am convinced that I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true expression… . The words which express our faith and piety are not definite; yet they are significant and fragrant like frankincense to superior natures” ( Walden , XVIII). We should not arbitrarily limit our awareness to that which can be described with mathematical exactitude: perhaps the highest knowledge available to us, Thoreau suggests, consists in “a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before … it is the lighting up of the mist by the sun” (“Walking”). And perhaps this is not a regrettable fact: “At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable” ( Walden , XVII). By acknowledging the limits of what we can know with certainty, we open ourselves up to a wider horizon of experience.

As one commentator points out, Thoreau's categories are more dynamic than Kant's, since they are constantly being redefined by what we perceive, even as they shape our way of seeing (Peck 1990, 84–85). Every now and then “something will occur which my philosophy has not dreamed of,” Thoreau says, which demonstrates that the “boundaries of the actual are no more fixed and rigid than the elasticity of our imaginations” ( Journal , 5/31/53). Since the thoughts of each knowing subject are “part of the meaning of the world,” it is legitimate to ask: “Who can say what is ? He can only say how he sees ” (11/4/52 & 12/2/46). Truth is radically perspective-dependent, which means that insofar as we are different people we can only be expected to perceive different worlds (Walls 1995, 213). Thoreau's position might be described as perspectival realism, since he does not conclude that truth is relative but celebrates the diversity of the multifaceted reality that each of us knows in his own distinctive way. “How novel and original must be each new man's view of the universe!” he exclaims; “How sweet is the perception of a new natural fact,” for it suggests to us “what worlds remain to be unveiled” ( Journal , 4/2/52 & 4/19/52). We may never comprehend the intimate relation between a significant fact and the perceiver who appreciates it, but we should trust that it is not in vain to view nature with “humane affections” ( Journal , 2/20/57 & 6/30/52). With respect to any given phenomenon, the “point of interest” that concerns us lies neither in the coolly independent object nor in the subject alone, but somewhere in between ( Journal , 11/5/57). Witnessing the rise of positivism and its ideal of complete objectivity, Thoreau attempts “to preserve an enchanted world and to place the passionate observer in the center of his or her universe” (Tauber 2001, 20). It is a noble goal, and one that remains quite relevant in the philosophical climate of the present day.

Thoreau's ethic of personal flourishing is focused upon the problem of how to align one's daily life in accordance with one's ultimate ideals. What was enthusiasm in the youth, he argues, must become temperament in the mature person: the “mere vision is little compared with the steady corresponding endeavor thitherward” ( Journal , 11/1/51 & 11/24/57). Much of our time ought to be spent “in carrying out deliberately and faithfully the hundred little purposes which every man's genius must have suggested to him… . The wisely conscious life springs out of an unconscious suggestion” ( Wild Fruits , 166). Character, then, can be defined as “genius settled”—the promptings of conscience in themselves are not yet moral, until we have integrated them into the fabric of our existence and begun to hold ourselves responsible for living up to them ( Journal , 3/2/42). Hence, we need to cherish and nurture our capability to discern the difference between the idea and the reality, between what is and what ought to be . It is when we experience dissatisfaction with ourselves or with external circumstances that we are stimulated to act in the interest of making things better.

It follows that the greatest compliment we can pay to another person is to say that he or she enhances our life by inciting us to realize our highest aspirations. So Thoreau views it as deplorable that “we may love and not elevate one another”; the “love that takes us as it finds us, degrades us” (“Chastity and Sensuality”). He speaks of “love” and “friendship” as closely related terms which are tainted by the “trivial dualism” which assumes that the one must exclude the other ( Journal , undated 1839 entry). Clearly, what he is concerned about is the kind of love the Greeks called philia —and in his sustained consideration of friendship, as in so many other respects, Thoreau is “squarely in the virtue ethics tradition” (Cafaro 2004, 127). In his ethical writings, the notion of wishing good on behalf of another person is often taken to a severe extreme, as if he does not think it possible to ask too much of love and friendship. In A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers , he says: “I value and trust those who love and praise my aspiration rather than my performance” ( A Week , “Wednesday”). This is fair enough, but Thoreau may be going too far when he proclaims that a friend should be approached “with sacred love and awe,” and that we profane one another if we do not always meet on religious terms; it is no wonder that he finds himself doubting whether his “idea of a friend” will ever actually be instantiated ( Journal , 6/26/40). Nonetheless, Thoreau's discussion of love and friendship provokes us to reflect upon what we can and cannot expect from our closest human relationships, and on their role in a good life.

Thoreau is only half-joking when he tells us that, after becoming frustrated with society, he turned “more exclusively than ever to the woods, where I was better known” ( Walden , I). Not only is it true that a degree of solitude and distance from our neighbors may actually improve our relations with them, but by moving away from the center of town we liberate ourselves from a slavish adherence to prevailing attitudes. “The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad,” Thoreau claims, and he provides this kind of example: “If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen” ( Walden , I & “Life Without Principle”). This warped sense of value is all too common amidst the fragmentation and desperation of modern life, in its “restless, nervous, bustling, trivial” activity ( Walden , XVIII). Thoreau builds a critique of American culture upon his conviction that “the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality” (“Life Without Principle”): his polemic aims at consumerism, philistinism, mass entertainment, vacuous applications of technology, and the herd mentality that bows down before an anonymous “They” ( Walden , I). During his life he spoke out against the Mexican War and the subjugation of Native America, and campaigned in favor of bioregionalism and the protection of animals and wild areas, but the political issue that roused his indignation more than any other was slavery.

Thoreau was an activist involved in the abolitionist movement on many fronts: he participated in the Underground Railroad, protested against the Fugitive Slave Law, and gave support to John Brown and his party. Most importantly, he provides a justification for principled revolt and a method of nonviolent resistance, both of which would have a considerable influence on revolutionary movements in the twentieth century. In his essay on “Civil Disobedience,” originally published as “Resistance to Civil Government,” he defends the validity of conscientious objection to unjust laws, which ought to be transgressed at once. Although at times it sounds as if Thoreau is advocating anarchy, what he demands is a better government, and what he refuses to acknowledge is the authority of one that has become so morally corrupt as to lose the consent of those governed. “There will never be a really free and enlightened State,” he argues, “until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly” (“Civil Disobedience”). There are simply more sacred laws to obey than the laws of society, and a just government—should there ever be such a thing, he says—would not be in conflict with the individual conscience.

Political institutions as such are regarded by Thoreau with distrust, and although he probably overestimates the extent to which it is possible to disassociate oneself from them, he convincingly insists that social consensus is not a guarantee of rectitude or truth. One of the most valuable points he makes against the critics of John Brown is that a person should not be dismissed as “insane” by virtue of dissenting from the majority: his anger is grounded upon an awareness of the fact that slavery is a violation of human rights, and the law-abiding citizens of Massachusetts are not excused for turning away from this reality (“A Plea for Captain John Brown”). Passively allowing an unjust practice to go on is tantamount to collaborating with evil. Unfortunately, Thoreau seems to assume that all of Brown's actions were justified because he was an inspired reformer with a sacred vocation. But he does succeed at pointing out the stupidity of certain knee-jerk responses to Brown's raid, and in this respect his essay has a more general pertinence to debates about the individual's relation to community norms. It also raises the issue of whether political violence can be justified as the lesser of evils, or in cases where it may be the only way of instigating reform.

Thoreau has somewhat misleadingly been classified as a New England transcendentalist, and—even though he never rejected this label—it does not really fit. Some of his major differences from Emerson have already been discussed, and further differences appear when Thoreau is compared to such figures as Orestes Brownson, Margaret Fuller, and Bronson Alcott. A history of transcendentalism in New England which appeared in the late nineteenth century mentions Thoreau only once, in passing (Frothingham 1886, 133). And a more recent history of the movement concludes that Thoreau had little in common with this group of thinkers, who were for the most part committed to some version of Christianity, to a dualistic understanding of mind and matter, and to the related idea that sense experience is unreliable (Boller 1974, 29–35 & 176). It was suggested above that a better way of situating Thoreau within the Western philosophical tradition is to consider him a kind of transcendental idealist, in the true Kantian spirit. For reasons that ought to be obvious by now, he should be of interest to students of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling—all of whom he studied at first or second hand—and possibly Schopenhauer. Thoreau was a literate and enthusiastic classicist, whose study of ancient Greek and Roman authors convinced him that philosophy ought to be a lived practice: so he can profitably be grouped with other nineteenth-century thinkers, such as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, who pointed out the limitations of the abstract philosophy of the early modern period. Yet he also has the distinction of being among the first Western philosophers to be significantly influenced by ancient Chinese and Indian thought. He anticipates Bergson and Merleau-Ponty in his attention to the dynamics of the embodied mind, and shares with Peirce and James a concern for problems of knowledge as they arise within the horizon of practical experience.

Ever so gradually, contemporary philosophers are discovering how much Thoreau has to teach—especially, in the areas of knowledge and perception, and in ethical debates about the value of land and life. His affinities with the pragmatic and phenomenological traditions, and the enormous resources he offers for environmental philosophy, have also started to receive more attention. Still, it remains true that the political aspect of Thoreau's philosophy has come closer to receiving its due than any of these others: whether or not this is because such prominent figures as Gandhi and Martin Luther King cited Thoreau as an inspiration, it has resulted in a disproportionate focus on what is only one part of an integral philosophy, a part that can hardly be understood in isolation from the others. Even if it is a sign of Thoreau's peculiar greatness that subsequent American philosophy has not known what to make of him, it is a shame if his exclusion from the mainstream philosophical canon has kept his voice from being heard by some of those who might be in a position to appreciate it. Then again, it is never too late to give up our prejudices. Recent and forthcoming work seems to indicate that Thoreau's influence is starting to show up more noticeably on the American philosophical landscape.

Works By Thoreau

• Walden; or, Life in the Woods , ed. Jeffrey Cramer, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Originally published in 1854. Parenthetical citations indicate with roman numerals which of Walden 's 18 chapters is the source of each quotation.
• The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau , 14 volumes, ed. B. Torrey and F. Allen, New York: Dover, 1962. Originally published in 1906. Parenthetical citations give the date of each entry.
• The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau , ed. Walter Harding and Carl Bode, New York: New York University Press, 1958. Citations give the date of the letter quoted.
• Consciousness in Concord: The Text of Thoreau's Hitherto “Lost Journal” (1840–1841) , ed. Perry Miller, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958. Citations give the date of each entry.
• The Indians of Thoreau: Selections from the Indian Notebooks , ed. Richard Fleck, Albuquerque: Hummingbird Press, 1974.
• Early Essays and Miscellanies , ed. Joseph Moldenhauer et al ., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975.
• A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers , ed. C. Hovde et al ., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. Originally published in 1849.
• The Maine Woods , New York: Penguin Books, 1988. Originally published in 1864.
• Cape Cod , ed. J. Moldenhauer, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. Originally published in 1865.
• Faith in a Seed: The Dispersion of Seeds and Other Late Natural History Writings , ed. Bradley Dean, Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993.
• Wild Fruits , ed. Bradley Dean, New York: W. W. Norton, 2000.
• Collected Essays and Poems , ed. Elizabeth Hall Witherell, New York: Penguin / Library of America, 2001. Contains “Natural History of Massachusetts” (originally published in 1842), “A Winter Walk” (1843), “Civil Disobedience” (1849), “A Plea for Captain John Brown” (1860), “Walking” (1862), “Autumnal Tints” (1862), “Life Without Principle” (1863), and “Chastity and Sensuality” (1865).

Selected Works by Other Authors

• Bennett, Jane, 2002, Thoreau's Nature: Ethics, Politics, and the Wild , Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.
• Blakemore, Peter, 2000, “Reading Home: Thoreau, Nature, and the Phenomenon of Inhabitation,” in Thoreau's Sense of Place , ed. Richard Schneider, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 115–132.
• Boller, Paul F., 1974, American Transcendentalism, 1830–1860: An Intellectual Inquiry , New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.
• Borjesson, Gary, 1994, “A Sounding of Walden 's Philosophical Depth,” Philosophy and Literature , 18: 287–308.
• Buell, Lawrence, 1995, The Environmental Imagination , Cambridge, MA: Belknap / Harvard University Press.
• Cafaro, Philip, 2004, Thoreau's Living Ethics: Walden and the Pursuit of Virtue , Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.
• Callicott, J. Baird, 1999, Beyond the Land Ethic , Albany: SUNY Press.
• Cavell, Stanley, 1988, In Quest of the Ordinary , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• –––, 1992, The Senses of Walden , expanded edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Originally published in 1972.
• –––, 2000, “Night and Day: Heidegger and Thoreau,” in Appropriating Heidegger , ed. J. Faulconer and M. Wrathall, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 30–49.
• Chapman, Robert L., 2002, “The Goat-stag and the Sphinx: The Place of the Virtues in Environmental Ethics,” Environmental Values , 11: 129–144.
• Eldridge, Richard, 2003, “Cavell on American Philosophy and the Idea of America,” in Stanley Cavell , ed. Richard Eldridge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 172–189.
• Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1993, “Nature,” in Essays: First and Second Series , ed. John Gabriel Hunt, New York: Gramercy / Library of Freedom, 282–297. Originally published in 1836.
• Foucault, Michel, 1997, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth , ed. Paul Rabinow, New York: The New Press.
• Frothingham, Octavius B., 1886, Transcendentalism in New England: A History , New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.
• Furtak, Rick Anthony, 2003, “Thoreau's Emotional Stoicism,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy , 17: 122–132.
• –––, 2007, “Skepticism and Perceptual Faith: Henry David Thoreau and Stanley Cavell on Seeing and Believing,” Transactions of the Charles Sanders Peirce Society , 43: 542–561.
• Garber, Frederick, 1977, Thoreau's Redemptive Imagination , New York: New York University Press.
• Hahn, Stephen, 2000, On Thoreau , Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
• Harding, Walter, 1962, The Days of Henry Thoreau: A Biography , New York: Dover.
• Hodder, Alan D., 2001, Thoreau's Ecstatic Witness , New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Jolley, Kelly Dean, 1996, “ Walden: Philosophy and Knowledge of Humankind,” Reason Papers , 21: 36–52.
• Kuklick, Bruce, 2001, A History of Philosophy in America: 1720–2000 , Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Löwith, Karl, 1997, Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same , trans. J. Harvey Lomax, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Originally published in 1978.
• McGregor, Robert Kuhn, 1997, A Wider View of the Universe: Henry Thoreau's Study of Nature , Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
• Milder, Robert, 1995, Reimagining Thoreau , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Mooney, Edward, 2009, Lost Intimacy in American Thought: Recovering Personal Philosophy from Thoreau to Cavell , London: Continuum.
• Moran, Michael, 1967, “Henry David Thoreau,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy , ed. Paul Edwards, New York: Free Press, 8: 121–123.
• Nagley, Winfield, 1954, “Thoreau on Attachment, Detachment, and Non-Attachment,” Philosophy East and West , 3: 307–320.
• Norton, Bryan G., 1999, “Pragmatism, Adaptive Management, and Sustainability,” Environmental Values , 8: 451–466.
• Oelschlaeger, Max, 1991, The Idea of Wilderness , New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Peck, H. Daniel, 1990, Thoreau's Morning Work , New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Richardson, Robert, 1986, Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind , Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
• Sattelmeyer, Robert, 1988, Thoreau's Reading , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Sayre, Robert, 1977, Thoreau and the American Indians , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Slovic, Scott, 1992, Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing , Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
• Tauber, Alfred, 2001, Henry David Thoreau and the Moral Agency of Knowing , Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
• Taylor, Bob Pepperman, 1994, “Henry Thoreau, Nature, and American Democracy,” Journal of Social Philosophy , 25: 46–64.
• Vilhauer, Benjamin, 2008, “The Theme of Time in Thoreau's Cape Cod ,” The Concord Saunterer , 16: 33–44.
• Walls, Laura Dassow, 1995, Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science , Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
• Ward, Andrew, 2007, “Ethics and Observation: Dewey, Thoreau, and Harman,” Metaphilosophy , 38: 591–611.
• Wilshire, Bruce, 2000, The Primal Roots of American Philosophy , University Park, PA: Penn State Press.
• Wilson, Jeffrey, 2004, “Autobiography as Critique in Thoreau,” Journal of Philosophical Research , 29: 29–46.
• The Thoreau Reader , offers text from the eserver project at Iowa State University.
• The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau , definitive scholarly edition from Princeton University Press.
• The Thoreau Society , website maintained by Michael Frederick.
• Henry David Thoreau , on American Transcendentalism Web.

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The Days of Henry Thoreau: A Biography Paperback – December 8, 2011

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Dover Publications; 2nd edition (December 8, 2011)
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Biography of Henry David Thoreau, American Essayist

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Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817-May 6, 1862) was an American essayist, philosopher, and poet. Thoreau’s writing is heavily influenced by his own life, in particular his time living at Walden Pond. He has a lasting and celebrated reputation for embracing non-conformity, the virtues of a life lived for leisure and contemplation, and the dignity of the individual.

Fast Facts: Henry David Thoreau

• Known For: His involvement in transcendentalism and his book Walden
• Born: July 12, 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts
• Parents: John Thoreau and Cynthia Dunbar
• Died: May 6, 1862 in Concord, Massachusetts
• Education: Harvard College
• Selected Published Works: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), “Civil Disobedience” (1849), Walden (1854), “Slavery in Massachusetts” (1854), “Walking" (1864)
• Notable Quote : “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” (From Walden)

Early Life and Education (1817-1838)

Henry David Thoreau was born on July 12, 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts, the son of John Thoreau and his wife, Cynthia Dunbar. The New England family was modest: Thoreau’s father was involved with the Concord fire department and ran a pencil factory, while his mother rented out parts of their house to boarders and cared for the children. Actually named David Henry at birth in honor of his late uncle David Thoreau, he was always known as Henry, although he never had his name changed officially. The third of four children, Thoreau spent a peaceful childhood in Concord, celebrating especially the natural beauty of the village. When he was 11, his parents sent him to Concord Academy, where he did so well that he was encouraged to apply to college.

In 1833, when he was 16 years old, Thoreau began his studies at Harvard College, following in the steps of his grandfather. His older siblings, Helen and John Jr., helped pay his tuition from their salaries. He was a strong student, but was ambivalent to the college’s ranking system, preferring to pursue his own projects and interests. This independent spirit also saw him taking a brief absence from the college in 1835 to teach at a school in Canton, Massachusetts, and was an attribute that would define the rest of his life.

Early Career Changes (1835-1838)

When he graduated in 1837 in the middle of his class, Thoreau was uncertain what to do next. Uninterested in a career in medicine, law, or ministry, as was common for educated men, Thoreau decided to continue working in education. He secured a place at a school in Concord, but he found he could not administer corporal punishment. After two weeks, he quit.

Thoreau went to work for his father’s pencil factory for a short time. In June of 1838 he set up a school with his brother John, though when John became ill just three years later, they shut it down. In 1838, however, he and John took a life-changing canoe trip along the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and Thoreau began considering a career as a poet of nature.

Friendship With Emerson (1839-1844)

In 1837, when Thoreau was a sophomore at Harvard, Ralph Waldo Emerson settled in Concord. Thoreau had already encountered Emerson’s writing in the book Nature. By autumn that year, the two kindred spirits had become friends, brought together by similar outlooks: both trusted staunchly in self-reliance, the dignity of the individual, and the metaphysical power of nature. Although they would have a somewhat tumultuous relationship, Thoreau ultimately found both a father and a friend in Emerson. It was Emerson who asked his protégé if he kept a journal (a lifelong habit of the older poet’s), prompting Thoreau to begin his own journal in late 1837, a habit which he, too, maintained for almost his entire life up until two months before his death. The journal spans thousands of pages, and many of Thoreau’s writings were originally developed from notes in this journal.

In 1840, Thoreau met and fell in love with a young woman visiting Concord by the name of Ellen Sewall. Although she accepted his proposal, her parents objected to the match and she immediately broke off the engagement. Thoreau would never make a proposal again, and never married.

Thoreau moved in with the Emersons for a time in 1841. Emerson encouraged the young man to pursue his literary leanings, and Thoreau embraced the profession of poet, producing many poems as well as essays. While living with the Emersons, Thoreau served as a tutor for the children, a repairman, a gardener, and ultimately an editor of Emerson’s works. In 1840, Emerson’s literary group, the transcendentalists, began the literary journal The Dial. The first issue published Thoreau’s poem “Sympathy” and his essay “Aulus Persius Flaccus,” on the Roman poet, and Thoreau continued contributing his poetry and prose to the magazine, including in 1842 with the first of his many nature essays, “Natural History of Massachusetts.” He continued publishing with The Dial until its shuttering in 1844 due to financial troubles.

Thoreau became restless while living with the Emersons. In 1842 his brother John had died a traumatic death in Thoreau’s arms, having contracted tetanus from cutting his finger while shaving, and Thoreau was struggling with the grief. Ultimately, Thoreau decided to move to New York, living with Emerson’s brother William on Staten Island, tutoring his children, and attempting to make connections among the New York literary market. Although he felt he was unsuccessful and he despised city life, it was in New York that Thoreau met Horace Greeley , who was to become his literary agent and a promoter of his work. He left New York in 1843 and returned to Concord. He worked partly at his father’s business, making pencils and working with graphite.

Within two years he felt he needed another change, and wanted to finish the book he had begun, inspired by his river canoe trip in 1838. Taken by the idea of a Harvard classmate, who had once built a hut by the water in which to read and think, Thoreau decided to take part in a similar experiment.

Walden Pond (1845-1847)

Emerson bequeathed to him the land he owned by Walden Pond, a small lake two miles south of Concord. In early 1845, at the age of 27, Thoreau started chopping down trees and building himself a small cabin on the shores of the lake. On July 4, 1845, he officially moved into the house in which he would live for two years, two months, and two days, officially beginning his famous experiment. These were to be some of the most satisfying years of Thoreau’s life.

His lifestyle at Walden was ascetic, informed by his desire to live a life as basic and self-sufficient as possible. While he would often walk into Concord, two miles away, and ate with his family once a week, Thoreau spent almost every night in his cottage on the banks of the lake. His diet consisted mostly of the food he found growing wild in the general area, although he also planted and harvested his own beans. Remaining active with gardening, fishing, rowing, and swimming, Thoreau also spent lots of time documenting the local flora and fauna. When he was not busy with the cultivation of his food, Thoreau turned to his inner cultivation, mainly through meditation. Most significantly, Thoreau spent his time in contemplation, reading and writing. His writing focused mainly on the book he had already begun, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), which chronicled the trip he spent canoeing with his older brother that ultimately inspired him to be become a poet of nature.

Thoreau also maintained a fastidious journal of this time of simplicity and satisfying contemplation. He was to return to his experience on the shore of that lake in just a few years to write the literary classic known as Walden (1854) , arguably Thoreau’s greatest work.

After Walden and “Civil Disobedience” (1847-1850)

• A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849)
• "Civil Disobedience" (1849)

In the summer of 1847, Emerson decided to travel to Europe, and invited Thoreau to reside once more at his house and continue tutoring the children. Thoreau, having completed his experiment and finished his book, lived at Emerson’s for two more years and continued his writing. Because he could not find a publisher for A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Thoreau published it at his own expense, and made little money off of its meager success.

During this time Thoreau also published "Civil Disobedience." Halfway through his time at Walden in 1846, Thoreau had been met by the local tax collector, Sam Staples, who had asked him to pay the poll tax that he had ignored for multiple years. Thoreau refused on the basis that he would not pay his taxes to a government which supported enslavement and which was waging the war against Mexico (which lasted from 1846-1848). Staples put Thoreau in jail, until the next morning when an unidentified woman, perhaps Thoreau’s aunt, paid the tax and Thoreau—reluctantly—went free. Thoreau defended his actions in an essay published in 1849 under the name “Resistance to Civil Government” and now known as his famous “Civil Disobedience.” In the essay, Thoreau defends individual conscience against the law of the masses. He explains that there is a higher law than civil law, and just because the majority believes something to be right does not make it so. It follows then, he explained, that when an individual intuits a higher law to which civil law does not accord, he must still follow the higher law—no matter what the civil consequences be, in his case, even spending time in jail. As he writes: “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.”

“Civil Disobedience” is one of Thoreau’s most lasting and influential works. It has inspired many leaders to begin their own protests, and has been particularly persuasive to non-violent protesters, including such figures as Martin Luther King Jr. and Mohandas Gandhi . 

Later Years: Nature Writing and Abolitionism (1850-1860)

• "Slavery in Massachusetts" (1854)
• Walden (1854)

Ultimately, Thoreau moved back into his family home in Concord, working occasionally at his father’s pencil factory as well as a surveyor to support himself while composing multiple drafts of Walden and finally publishing it in 1854. After his father’s death, Thoreau took over the pencil factory.

By the 1850s, Thoreau was less interested in transcendentalism, as the movement was already splitting apart. He continued, however, to explore his ideas about nature, traveling to the Maine Woods, Cape Cod, and to Canada. These adventures found their places in articles, “Ktaadn, and the Maine Woods,” (1848), which was later to make up the beginning of his book The Maine Woods (published posthumously in 1864) , “Excursion to Canada” (1853), and “Cape Cod” (1855).

With such works, Thoreau is now seen as one of the founders of the genre of American nature writing. Also published posthumously (in Excursions , 1863) is the lecture he developed from 1851 to 1860 and which was ultimately known as the essay "Walking" (1864), in which he outlined his thinking on mankind's relationship to nature and the spiritual importance of leaving society for a time. Thoreau thought of the piece as one of his seminal pieces and it is one of the definitive works of the transcendental movement.

In response to growing national unrest regarding the abolition of enslavement, Thoreau found himself adopting a more stringently abolitionist stance. In 1854 he delivered a scathing lecture called “Slavery in Massachusetts,” in which he indicted the whole country for the evils of enslavement, even the free states where enslavement was outlawed—including, as the title suggested, his own Massachusetts. This essay is one of his most celebrated achievements, with an argument both stirring and elegant.

Illness and Death (1860-1862)

In 1835, Thoreau contracted tuberculosis and suffered from it periodically over the course of his life. In 1860 he caught bronchitis and from then on his health began to decline. Aware of his impending death, Thoreau showed remarkable tranquility, revising his unpublished works (including The Maine Woods and Excursions) and concluding his journal. He died in 1862, at the age of 44, of tuberculosis. His funeral was planned and attended by the Concord literary set, including Amos Bronson Alcott and William Ellery Channing; his old and great friend Emerson delivered his eulogy.

Thoreau did not see the huge successes in his lifetime that Emerson saw in his. If he was known, it was as a naturalist, not as a political or philosophical thinker. He only published two books in his lifetime, and he had to publish A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers himself, while Walden was hardly a bestseller.

Thoreau is now, however, known as one of the greatest American writers. His thinking has exerted a massive worldwide influence, in particular on the leaders of non-violent liberation movements such as Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., both of whom cited "Civil Disobedience" as a major influence on them. Like Emerson, Thoreau's work in transcendentalism responded to and reaffirmed an American cultural identity of individualism and hard work that is still recognizable today. Thoreau's philosophy of nature is one of the touchstones of the American nature-writing tradition. But his legacy is not only literary, academic, or political, but also personal and individual: Thoreau is a cultural hero for the way he lived his life as a work of art, championing his ideals down to the most everyday of choices, whether it be in solitude on the banks of Walden or in behind the bars of the Concord jail.

• Furtak, Rick Anthony, "Henry David Thoreau", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2019/entries/thoreau/ .
• Harding, Walter. The Days of Henry David Thoreau. Princeton University Press, 2016.
• Packer, Barbara. The Transcendentalists. University of Georgia Press, 2007.
• Thoreau, Henry David. Walden . Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg, 1995. Retrieved November 21, 2019 from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/205/205-h/205-h.htm .
• Ralph Waldo Emerson: American Transcendentalist Writer and Speaker
• Notable Authors of the 19th Century
• Biography of Ralph Waldo Emerson, American Essayist
• Biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Biography of Washington Irving, Father of the American Short Story
• Biography of Henry Miller, Novelist
• Biography of Herman Melville, American Novelist
• Biography of Louisa May Alcott, American Writer
• Mark Twain: His Life and His Humor
• Biography of George Eliot, English Novelist
• George Orwell: Novelist, Essayist and Critic
• Complete List of John Steinbeck's Books
• Biography of Edith Wharton, American Novelist
• Biography of Bram Stoker, Irish Author
• Life of Wilkie Collins, Grandfather of the English Detective Novel
• Biography of Charles Dickens, English Novelist

• Pre-Colonial Mass
• 17th Century Mass
• 18th Century Mass
• 19th Century Mass

Henry David Thoreau’s Best Books & Essays

Henry David Thoreau published two books and numerous essays during his lifetime and many more of his works were published after his death in 1862.

Deciding on which of these Thoreau books or essays you should read really depends on what type of Thoreau writing is your favorite.

If you are more of a fan of his political writing, then his essays and books such as Civil Disobedience, Slavery in Massachusetts and John Brown are probably more your style.

If you are more drawn to his nature and philosophical writing, then Walden, Walking, Wild Apples, Cape Cod would be a better option for you.

If you haven’t read much of Thoreau’s work and don’t know what type of his writing you prefer, here is a general overview of his best essays and books:

(Disclaimer: This post contains Amazon affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.)

Published in 1854, Walden is Thoreau’s most famous book and many would argue is his best. The book is about the virtues of simple living and self-sufficiency in a modern world and was inspired by the two years Thoreau spent living in a small cabin at the edge of Walden Pond in the 1840s.

The book is a complex work that is part memoir, part sermon, part manifesto and, at its heart, is about how to live a full and meaningful life amid a world full of drudgery and meaningless distractions.

Walden was moderately successful when it was published, but took five years to sell 2,000 copies. It then went out of print until Thoreau’s death in 1862. It has since become an American classic.

The book received a number of favorable reviews when it was originally published in 1854, though its unique perspective and subject matter perplexed many reviewers.

The Boston Commonwealth found it thought-provoking and delightful:

“We mean, before long, to say how delightful a book this is but it is now Saturday, the very day when people buy books, and we can only say that it is just the pleasantest and most readable, the most-thought-provoking book of the present season. It is a better work than the author’s previous one, ‘A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,’ though we reckon that as a book which will live in American literature a good while.”

The Saturday Evening Post declared it strange but interesting:

“We have, now and then, in this jostling, civilized world, an unmistakable human oddity, and the author of this strange, but interesting book, is one of that class…Nevertheless, his ‘Life in the Woods’ is a most fascinating book.”

The Boston Herald deemed the book “a readable and interesting one” while the New York Times declared Thoreau a genius but also wrote the book off as selfish:

“The author of this book – Mr Henry D. Thoreau – is undoubtedly a man of genius. It is not possible to open twenty pages without finding plentiful indications of that fact. Unfortunately, however, he is an erratic genius, thoroughly impracticable, and apt to confuse rather than arrange the order of things, mental and physical…Mr. Thoreau is a good writer, possessed of great comic powers, and able to describe accurately many peculiar phases of nature. But the present work will fail to satisfy any class of readers. The literary man may be pleased with the style, but he will surely lament the selfish animus of the book.”

As beloved as the book is, modern readers still sometimes struggle with the old-fashioned prose as well as the overall message of the book, as can be seen from the handful of reader reviews on Goodreads and Amazon criticizing it as judgemental, elitist and hard to read.

Nonetheless, some readers who said they initially struggled with the book eventually came to understand and enjoy it, as one reviewer on Goodreads explained:

“The concluding chapter, to an extent, rewarded me for my persistence and toil. In this final chapter, he comes back to the real purpose of the book: to drill home a simple idea – ‘I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws will be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings.’ This I think was the core philosophy of the book – if you pursue the ideal direction/vision you have of how your life should be, and not how convention dictates it should be, then you will find success and satisfaction on a scale unimaginable through those conventional routes or to those conventional minds.”

Published in 1849, under its original title of Resistance to Civil Government, this essay advocates resistance to unjust laws and governments and was inspired by Thoreau’s experience of being arrested and jailed for refusing to pay his poll tax because he believed it was being used to fund the Mexican-American war, which he opposed.

As activist and historian Howard Zinn explained in the introduction to the book The Higher Law: Thoreau on Civil Disobedience and Reform, which is a collection of Thoreau’s political essays including Civil Disobedience, Thoreau was addressing important questions in these essays about how to do the right thing in an unjust world:

“You will find in this volume (published previously in hardcover as Reform Papers) what are usually called the ‘political writings’ of Thoreau. Indeed, he is dealing here with the incendiary issues of his time: the Mexican War, the Fugitive Slave Act, the execution of John Brown. The term ‘political,’ however, does not do justice to the breadth and depth of Thoreau’s ideas. He looks beyond the immediate subjects of contention to ask the fundamental questions pondered before and after his time by the world’s great thinkers: Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Marx, Tolstoy. That is, he addresses the obligations of the citizen to government, of law to justice, of human beings to one another. In this collection, he does something more–he asks the most troubling question of human existence: how shall we live our lives in a society that makes being human more and more difficult?”

In the 20th century, many activists of the time cited the book as a major influence on their own ideas and activism, particularly Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandi and civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr:

“My first introduction to Thoreau’s writing was, I think, in 1907, or later, when I was in the thick of the passive resistance struggle. A friend sent me an essay on ‘Civil Disobedience.’ It left a deep impression on me.” – Mahatma Gandi “I became convinced that what we were preparing to do in Montgomery [Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955] was related to what Thoreau had expressed. We were simply saying to the white community, ‘We can no longer lend our cooperation to an evil system.’” – Martin Luther King, Jr

Published posthumously in the Atlantic Monthly Magazine one month after Thoreau’s death in 1862, this essay is about the art of taking a walk and how it allows you to better explore and appreciate nature, which, Thoreau argues, humans are not separate from but are a part of, as he explains in the opening line of the essay:

“I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil – to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.”

An article in Slate Magazine, titled Walking Home from Walden, argues that Walking is a precursor or perhaps even a companion piece to Walden:

“If you understand ‘Walking,’ you can almost skip Walden. (I’m not really recommending that—in fact, please don’t.) What I mean is this: It’s clear that ‘Walking,’ and the actual walking that inspired it, leads to Walden. Within a year of delivering the ‘Walking’ lecture for the first time, in the spring of 1851, Thoreau was back at his draft of the big book, revising and expanding with renewed creative energy. You could almost say Thoreau ‘walked’ to Walden. And yet if ‘Walking’ is a sermon, then Walden is something more like prophecy—its author the Reformer and child of wildness, divine messenger, sent to save the town. ”

Thoreau himself seems to have agreed with this sentiment when he scribbled on the title page of a draft of the essay in 1852: “I regard this as a sort of introduction to all that I may write hereafter.”

Published posthumously in 1864, the book chronicles three separate trips Thoreau took to the woods of Maine in the 1840s and 1850s.

It consists primarily of a series of articles previously published in the Atlantic Monthly Magazine in 1858, as well as some unpublished material, that describe the Maine landscape and identify the types of trees, plants and animals of the area while also weaving in a bit of philosophy from time to time.

In the introduction to the 1983 Princeton University Press edition of the book, Paul Theroux explains that since the book was published after Thoreau’s death, it is a bit unfinished but, although it is not exactly a cohesive work, it is still an excellent read:

“The Maine Woods published posthumously is a set of three narratives in various states of completion; not a unified book, but rather a three-decker sandwich of woodland excursions. As a record of impressions, a work in progress, it is all the more interesting. ‘Ktaadn’ is a polished and youthful piece, ‘Chesuncook’ finished and mature, and ‘The Allegash and East Branch’ somewhat provisional though containing a wealth of information.”

The New York Times recently described it, in an article about retracing Thoreau’s Maine trips, as “an insightful reporter’s picture of a rugged wilderness the moment before being irrevocably altered by armies of loggers.”

Reviewers on Amazon describe the book as more of a travel story than a manifesto like Walden, as one Amazon reviewer said: “Do not read this and compare it to Walden or as a some window into Thoreau, but for sheer joy of kicking off the canoe at Telos and the wonder of the north country.”

Published posthumously in 1865, this book is similar to Thoreau’s other book The Maine Woods because it is about three separate trips that Thoreau took to Cape Cod in the 1840s and 1850s.

It consists primarily of a series of articles previously published in Putnam Magazine in 1855 that describe the natural beauty of Cape Cod and suggests that a trip to the beach, like many journeys into the wilderness, can be a spiritual journey.

According to an article titled At the Threshold of Chaos: Henry Thoreau on Cape Cod, on the Thoreau Society website, the book suggests that the beach is the place to go if you want to think and be inspired:

“At the center of Cape Cod is an idea of the beach as a threshold of creative energy: ‘The sea-shore is a sort of neutral ground, a most advantageous point from which to contemplate this world’…A man may stand there and put all America behind him.”

Also present in the text are some of Thoreau’s most fundamental beliefs, such as his belief, which is also present in Walden, that one should seek spiritual wealth instead of material wealth. This can be seen when Thoreau describes watching a sloop in Chatham dragging the sea bed for lost ship anchors:

“But that is not treasure for us which another man has lost; rather it is for us to seek what no other man has found or can find,—not be Chatham men, dragging for anchors.”

The Walden Woods Project published a statement in the Cape Cod: Illustrated Edition of the American Classic, explaining that Thoreau’s Cape Cod is a mix philosophy, nature worship and travel adventure:

“Yet, like any Thoreauvian excursion, Cape Cod is anything but a simple travel narrative. It encompasses all the Thoreaus we have come to expect: the saunterer, the reformer, the social critic, the natural philosopher, and the father of the American environmental movement.”

Published in 1849, the book is about a camping trip to the White Mountains that Thoreau took with his brother John in 1839.

After John Thoreau died of tetanus in 1842, Thoreau decided to publish the book as a tribute to him and worked on the early drafts of the book while living at Walden Pond from 1845 to 1847.

Thoreau paid for the publishing costs of the book himself. Unfortunately, the book didn’t sell well and the publisher, James Munroe and Company, returned the remaining 700 copies to Thoreau. In a letter to a friend, Thoreau said: “I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.”

According to the introduction of the Princeton University Press edition of the book, John McPhee states that the book didn’t sell well because Thoreau’s unorthodox style was too ahead of its time and, since it was Thoreau’s first book, readers were unfamiliar with who Thoreau was as a writer. McPhee explains that modern readers appreciate the book more because they know and understand Thoreau’s work better:

“The book’s heterodoxy and apparent formlessness troubled its contemporary audience. Modern readers, however, have come to see it as an appropriate predecessor to Walden, with Thoreau’s story of a river journey depicting the early years of his spiritual and artistic growth.”

An article on the Thoreau Society website, titled Life and Legacy, explains that readers at the time also found the book to be problematic because it had a “looseness of structure and a preaching tone unalleviated by humor, that had put readers off.” These issues actually prompted Thoreau to hold off on publishing Walden so he could revise it and avoid these problems.

Modern readers don’t seem to have an issue with the structure or tone of the book and feel that if there is a problem, it lies in the reader and not the book, as one Amazon reviewer said:

“It is obscene that abridged versions of this book are for sale. ‘A Week…’ is an artistic masterpiece. If it seems a bit dense right now, then put the book on your shelf for a few decades and hope that you, not the book, will improve over time.”

Published posthumously in 1863, the book discusses ethical principles for living a righteous life. It argues that working solely for money will morally bankrupt you and that you should instead do a job because you love the work, as Thoreau explains:

“The ways by which you may get your money almost without exception lead downward. If you traded in messages from heaven, the whole curse of business would attach to it. To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been truly idle or worse. If the laborer gets no more than the wages his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself.”

The book was based on an essay in 1856, alternatively titled Getting a Living and What Shall It Profit?, that Thoreau later revised and edited for publication but died before being able to do so. It was finally published in 1863 in the Atlantic Monthly Magazine.

According to the book Reimaging Thoreau by Robert Midler, Life Without Principle is a bold essay that challenges readers to re-evaluate their lives and take stock of what’s really important:

“’Getting a Living’ (as revised in ‘Life Without Principle’) is his most abrasive literary performance, resuming the critique of materialism in ‘Economy’ but converting its reformist stance into a moralism calculated to affront his readers and drive a wedge between his own principled but (financially) ‘profitless’ life and their truly profitless lives.”

Many reviewers on Goodreads describe the essay as insightful and thought-provoking and praise the essay’s anti-consumer and anti-materialistic message, as one reviewer said:

“If an apple a day keeps the doctor away, then a daily page of Thoreau or Emerson will flush the consumer out of your system.”

Published posthumously in the Atlantic Monthly Magazine six months after Thoreau’s death in 1862, this essay discusses the history of the apple and how it came to grow and evolve over time.

The essay is based on a lecture of the same name that Thoreau delivered at the Bedford Lyceum on February 14, 1860.

An article on the website MappingThoreauCountry.org points out that the essay is more than a simple history of fruit and is actually a transcendental lesson about learning and knowledge:

“In narrating the apple tree’s valiant resistance to its enemies and the enterprising methods it used to insinuate itself across the country, Thoreau was not so much anthropomorphizing evolution as he was implying that our direct experience of natural phenomena informs our understanding, which includes but is not limited to facts alone.”

While many of the book’s reader reviews on Amazon seem to have missed the point of the book and state that it’s just a simple book about apples, one reviewer, who titled their review “Not Just About Apples,” picked up on the subtext of the essay:

“While this was an interesting dissertation about apples, it was also about the settling of the New World. Comparing Thoreau’s time with our own, we seem to have lost our spirit of adventure. We seem to have lost our ‘wildness’ so to speak. We have become tribal and no longer have the self reliance that Thoreau and Emerson valued.”

Another Amazon reviewer noted that the book was a “story of overlooked beauty” and enjoyed the inspiring message of the essay:

“While the title is “Wild Apples” and the text describes Thoreau’s love of and experience with the various wild apple trees he “discovered” the story could be about tenaciousness, flexibility and resolve; making something worthwhile from poor circumstances and despite expectations and appearances.”

Published in 1854 in the Liberator Magazine, this essay is based on a speech that Thoreau gave at an anti-slavery rally in Framingham, Massachusetts in July of 1854 after the re-enslavement of fugitive slave Anthony Burns in Boston, Massachusetts.

The essay expands on the ideas in Civil Disobedience and attacks the state of Massachusetts for complying with the Fugitive Slave Act, according to an article on the PoetryFoundation.org:

“His attack is now not merely on slavery in general but on his own state’s complicity with an immoral law. Thoreau retains his Transcendentalist plea that one trust one’s inner conscience to judge the state’s actions, but he moves much closer to advocating the destruction of a state that engages in practices such as slavery.”

The essay is considered a part of Thoreau’s “political writings” and since it explores concepts such as morals, ethics and laws, it is similar in nature to his other essay Civil Disobedience.

Since slavery was abolished over 150 years ago, the subject matter may be seem out of date, but as one reviewer on Goodreads points out, the essay’s message about politics in general make it as relevant as ever:

“Master of rhetoric. This essay contains criticism of American government and press that is still relevant today. My favorite quote is, ‘if the majority in congress were to vote the devil to be God. . . the minority must then wait and comply until a later date to reinstate God.’”

Published posthumously in the Atlantic Monthly Magazine in 1862, this essay was based on a lecture that Thoreau delivered at Frazier Hall in Lynn in 1859. The essay is about nature in autumn and reflects on the changes that occur during this time.

A recent article in the Atlantic Monthly Magazine describes Autumnal Tints as “a naturalist’s guide to truly seeing nature” and argues that the essay reflects on Autumn as a time of renewal instead of a time of death:

“Instead of viewing autumn as a time of death and decay, Thoreau came to see and celebrate the season (and death itself) as nature’s own way of renewing life. He believed that if we could see properly, even fallen leaves on the ground could ‘teach us how to die.'”

Thoreau revised the essay while he was dying of tuberculosis and one reviewer on Goodreads noted the symbolism of the text in the context of Thoreau’s own impending death:

“For Thoreau, an autumn leaf is not just an autumn leaf. Rather, it is a symbol that helps him confront the idea of his own death with the hope that he would live on in some way, much as the dying leaves of fall go on to be a part of future forests.”

Sources: Midler, Robert. Reimagining Thoreau . Cambridge University Press, 1995. Princeton Alumni Weekly . Vol. 69, 1968. Berger, Michael Benjamin. Thoreau’s Late Career and The Dispersion of Seeds . Camden House, 2000. Thoreau, Henry David. Cape Cod: Illustrated Edition of the American Classic. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2008. Dean, Bradley P. and Gary Scharnhorst. “The Contemporary Reception of Walden.” Studies in American Renaissance , 1990, pp: 293-328. Andriote, John-Manuel. “Revisiting the Splendor of Thoreau’s Autumnal Tints.” Atlantic Monthly Magazine , 1 Nov. 2012, theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/11/revisiting-the-splendor-of-thoreaus-autumnal-tints-150-years-later/264291/ “Henry David Thoreau.” The Poetry Foundation , poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/henry-david-thoreau Berman, Paul. “Thoreau Among the Cranberries.” New York Times , New York Times Company, 26 Dec. 1999, nytimes.com/books/99/12/26/reviews/991226.26bermant.html “Bedord.” Mapping Thoreau Country . mappingthoreaucountry.org/itineraries/bedford/ Thoreau, Henry David. “Wild Apples: The History of the Apple.” Atlantic Monthly Magazine , Nov. 1862, theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/1862nov/186211thoreau.htm “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers: With a New Introduction by John McPhee.” Princeton University Press , press.princeton.edu/titles/7720.html “At the Threshold of Chaos; Henry David Thoreau on Cape Cod by Elizabeth Kalman with Nicholas Holdgate.” Thoreau Society , thoreausociety.org/news-article/threshold-chaos-henry-thoreau-cape-cod-elizabeth-kalman-nicholas-holdgate Gilsdorf, Ethan. “Tracking Thoreau Through Maine’s Grim and Wild Land.” New York Times , New York Times Company, 19 Sept. 2008, nytimes.com/2008/09/19/travel/escapes/19american.html Stephenson, West. “Walking Home from Walden.” Slate Magazine, 21 June. 2011, slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/features/2011/walking_home_from_walden/part_3_the_surprises_that_awaited_me_in_the_works_of_henry_david_thoreau.html Thoreau, Henry David. “Walking.” Atlantic Monthly Magazine , June 1862, theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1862/06/walking/304674/ “The Higher Law: Thoreau on Civil Disobedience and Reform: With an Introduction by Howard Zinn.” Princeton University Press , press.princeton.edu/titles/7719.html Dean, Bradley P. “Reconstructions of Thoreau’s Early Life Without Principle Lecture.” Studies in American Renaissance , University Press of Virginia, 1987, pp: 285-364, jstor.org/stable/30228137?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

Henry David Thoreau’s Best Books 📚

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Henry David Thoreau was a man to which several great books and philosophies are attributed - and his best books carry some of the most provocative but rational social ideals.

Article written by Victor Onuorah

Degree in Journalism from University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

At the core of his pool of literary contributions lies Henry David Thoreau’s masterwork ‘ Walden ,’ a book whose strange, yet psychologically stimulating, ideas continue to have a tremendous impact on society and readership. The prolific author has some of the best impactful write-ups and they will be overviewed here. 

Also called ‘ Life in the Woods ,’ ‘ Walden ’ is a book written more than one-and-the-half centuries ago by Henry David Thoreau. The book is a celebrated work of classic literature and was originally written in eighteen separate essays initially published as a lecture meant for an esoteric group. 

In ‘ Walden ,’ Henry David Thoreau talks about his encounter surviving outside of society for two years. Thoreau was a stout believer in individuality and personal freedom and greatly criticized society and government, blaming them for being too controlling and unnecessarily dictating human and individual lives to the extent that it became detrimental. 

Thoreau embarked on a social experiment and moral and spiritual awakening in Walden Pond, a place where he didn’t have to live by social expectations and conventions. A place where sought to discover the absolute minimalistic necessity of life. Henry David Thoreau’s ‘ Walden ’ continues to be a profound reference material for student readers and social researchers across the globe to date.

Henry David Thoreau, aside from his strong opinions on individualism, was also a nature writer and lover of the wild, and his accomplishments in ‘ Walking ’ was so profound that it became pure gold in terms of ideas for nature activists and environmentalists. 

Published in the mid-1800s, ‘ Walking ’ is a book that argues that the best things in life are free and natural – with the book also proffering how people can make the most of these natural things for a better life. 

There’s a variety of aspects touched by Henry David Thoreau in ‘ Walking ,’ and a few of them includes the benefits of casual walking, and how to spend time in the woods and wild for a transformative life, among other things. Despite being more than a hundred years old, ‘ Walking ’ is still a go-to book for nature activists and individuals hoping to make good time in their surrounding environment. 

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

This piece is remembered for being the maiden book of Henry David Thoreau and offers a delightful experience for readers, hardly indicative that the author was a novice writer. ‘ A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers ’ follows Henry David Thoreau’s writing about a cruise trip he and his brother embark across the Concords of Massachusetts and New Hampshire. 

Thoreau, in this book, once again shows the quality of his ideas and writing, as he included poems and journals, buttressing his ideals of fervent individuality and transcendentalism. 

Civil Disobedience and Other Essays

This is a fine collection of essays and word plays by Henry David Thoreau. The collection includes stories such as ‘ Wild Apple, ’ and ‘ Herald of Freedom ’ – with ‘ Civil Disobedience, ’ which follows his critiquing of government attacks on civil liberty, being the collection’s frontal story. 

What book is Henry David Thoreau best know for?

Thoreau published a lot of popular books and essays with socially compelling ideas. However, his best-known work remains ‘ Walden ,’ also called ‘ Life in the Woods.’ 

Is ‘ Walden ’ fiction?

‘ Walden ’ is typically nonfiction as it follows a real-life account of Thoreau’s two years hiatus in Walden Pond – where he sought to find the most minimalistic essence of life.

What kind of writing did Henry David Thoreau do?

Thoreau mostly did nonfiction – mostly in the forms of memoirs, straight essays, and journals. He was a well-enlightened man of his age who promoted his ideas of individualism and self-hood. 

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About Victor Onuorah

Victor is as much a prolific writer as he is an avid reader. With a degree in Journalism, he goes around scouring literary storehouses and archives; picking up, dusting the dirt off, and leaving clean even the most crooked pieces of literature all with the skill of analysis.

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Sauntering through Special Collections with Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was an American author whose works explore the relationship of the individual to nature and to society. Walden , his account of a two year stay at Walden Pond, is one of the founding documents of the United States’ cultural independence from England. He also published essays—many of them first delivered as lectures—on the role of the ethical individual in an unjust society, and kept journals recording the wildlife he observed during his lifetime. His philosophy might be best expressed in his declaration that "in Wildness is the preservation of the World;" his writings still shape our ideas about individual liberty and our perceptions of wilderness today. 

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (published 1849), is an account of a journey by boat which Thoreau and his brother John took ten years earlier. Thoreau blends his contributions to the Transcendentalist tradition into the narrative, which is also a memorial to his brother John, who died of tetanus three years after the trip. This book, published by the Limited Editions Club in 1975, is signed by the designer and illustrator. 

In Walking , first delivered as a lecture in 1851, and published after his death, Thoreau declares that that he cannot preserve his health and spirits, unless he spends a good part of his day "sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields;" he cannot understand how others are able to spend their lives in offices and shops. This edition, printed on paper from Barcham Green Hayle Mill in England, comes from Ninja Press, which produces its books by letterpress. The titling was taken from the printers’ copy manuscript of the original text written in Thoreau’s hand. 

The Maine Woods (published 1864) builds on earlier themes in his work by exploring a wilder aspect of the natural world. It recounts three journeys Thoreau took with friends, in an effort to avoid becoming too comfortable in the Concord woods. The best known episode in this work portrays his ascent of Mount Ktaadn as an experience of the Romantic sublime, complementing his pastoral sojourn at Walden Pond. "This was that Earth," he wrote, "of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night…Man was not to be associated with it." 

Special Collections & Archives also has a Little Leather book which gathers several of Thoreau’s essays, and Nature’s Diary by Francis H. Allen, which features quotes by several nature writers, including Thoreau, alongside Allen’s own journal entries. Captivity Narrative of Hannah Duston by Arion Press, with woodblock prints by Richard Bosman, compiles four versions of Duston’s story. Spirit & Matter , also by Ninja Press, features excerpts from Emerson’s Nature and Thoreau’s The Maine Woods . The Winged Life features a selection of poet Robert Bly’s favorite works by Thoreau; this book was designed by Carolyn and James Robertson, of Yolla Bolly Press, which specialized in handcrafted limited editions. It is printed on Arches 88, a French paper, and features Michael McCurdy’s wood engravings of Thoreau and the landscapes he inhabited.  

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Last Updated: 09/11/2024