Concord and Harvard
Born in Concord on 12 July 1817, he graduated from Harvard College in 1837 and began his journal that autumn.
American Transcendentalism · natural history · 1817–1862
Henry David Thoreau
Live deliberately; refuse what conscience condemns.
Concord · Walden Pond · Massachusetts
Biography
The thread of a life.
Henry David Thoreau, an essayist, land surveyor and naturalist from Concord, Massachusetts, treated philosophy as a way of living rather than a system of doctrines. His two years in a cabin beside Walden Pond, his refusal to pay a tax that supported slavery and war, and a journal kept for more than two decades connect close attention to nature, economy of means and the claims of individual conscience.
School, Emerson and The Dial
He ran a school with his brother John, lived in Emerson’s household and published poems and essays in the Transcendentalist journal The Dial.
The cabin at Walden
From 4 July 1845 to 6 September 1847 he lived in a cabin he had built on land owned by Emerson beside Walden Pond.
A night in jail
Jailed for one night in July 1846 for refusing to pay his poll tax, he turned the episode into a lecture printed in 1849 as Resistance to Civil Government.
Two books
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, published at his own expense in 1849, sold poorly; Walden appeared in 1854.
Abolition, natural history, death
He spoke against slavery, defended John Brown in 1859, recorded the seasonal cycles of plants around Concord and died of tuberculosis on 6 May 1862.
Understanding a life in depth
01Concord, Harvard and the journal
Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1817, into a family of modest means that later lived from making pencils and refining graphite. He studied ancient and modern languages at Harvard College, graduating in 1837. That autumn, encouraged by Ralph Waldo Emerson, he began the journal he kept until 1861: some two million words that served as a quarry for his books and as a long record of observation. He resigned from the town school after a few weeks in protest against corporal punishment, and from 1838 to 1841 he ran a private school with his brother John that made room for walks and lessons out of doors.
02Emerson’s circle and the loss of John
Through Emerson, Thoreau joined the loose circle of New England Transcendentalists, who looked to intuition, self-reliance and nature as sources of spiritual truth. From 1841 to 1843 he lived in Emerson’s household as handyman and companion, and published poems, essays and translations from Greek in The Dial. In 1839 he and John had travelled by boat and on foot along the Concord and Merrimack rivers; John’s sudden death from tetanus in January 1842 marked him deeply. After a stay on Staten Island in 1843, where he worked as a tutor and tried the New York literary market, he returned to Concord. He gave Transcendentalist ideals a concrete anchor in manual work, walking and precise observation.
03Walden and the refused tax
On 4 July 1845 Thoreau moved into a one-room cabin he had built on Emerson’s woodlot by Walden Pond, where he stayed until 6 September 1847. He grew beans, read, received visitors and drafted both A Week and Walden. The cabin lay within an easy walk of the village, and he often visited family and friends: it was an experiment in economy and attention, not a hermit’s retreat. In July 1846 the local constable jailed him for refusing to pay his poll tax, a protest against slavery and the war against Mexico; he was released the next morning after someone, probably a relative, paid. The lecture he drew from the episode in 1848 became his essay on civil resistance.
04Surveyor, abolitionist and naturalist
After Walden, Thoreau earned his living as a land surveyor, in the family graphite business and as a lecturer. Walden appeared in 1854 after several rounds of revision. That year he denounced the return of fugitive slaves in Slavery in Massachusetts, and in 1859 he defended John Brown’s armed raid on Harpers Ferry, which complicates any reading of him as a simple theorist of nonviolence. Journeys to the Maine woods and Cape Cod fed later books, while his journal gathered detailed records of flowering, leafing and ice on the ponds that ecologists have since used to measure shifts in the seasons. He died of tuberculosis in Concord in 1862; much of his work, including the journal, appeared only after his death.
Walden became a founding text of American nature writing and environmental thought, and Civil Disobedience later mattered to Gandhi and to Martin Luther King Jr. Critics question his individualism, the staging of his solitude and the reach of his politics; reading him well means weighing the lived experiment against its careful literary composition.
Sources & reference points