1817年7月12日，梭罗出生于的康科德城（Concord, Massachusetts），1837年毕业于，是个品学兼优的学生。毕业后他回到家乡以教书为业。1841年起他不再教书而转为写作。在（）的支持下，梭罗在康科德住下并开始了他的超验主义实践。这时期，梭罗放弃诗歌创作而开始撰写随笔，起先给超验主义刊物《》（Dial）写稿，其后各地的报纸杂志上都有他的文章问世。
梭罗除了被一些人尊称为第一个环境保护主义者外，还是一位关注人类生存状况的有影响的哲学家，他的著名论文《论公民的不服从权利》影响了和圣雄。
1845年7月4日梭罗开始了一项为期两年的试验，他移居到离家乡康科德城（Concord）不远，优美的瓦尔登湖畔的次生林里，尝试过一种简单的隐居生活。他于1847年9月6日离开瓦尔登湖，重新和住在康科德城的他的朋友兼导师拉尔夫·沃尔多·爱默生一家生活在一起。出版于1854年的散文集《瓦尔登湖》（Walden）详细记载了他在瓦尔登湖畔两年又两个月的生涯。虽毕业于世界闻名的哈佛大学，但他没有选择经商发财或者从政成为明星，而是平静地选择了瓦尔登湖，选择了心灵的自由和闲适。他搭起木屋，开荒种地，写作看书，过着非常简朴、原始的生活。
在不同时期，梭罗靠教书与务工过活。他曾经在他家办的铅笔厂工作过，还发明了一种可以简化生产、降低费用的机器。
梭罗是拉尔夫·沃尔多·爱默生的学生和朋友，受爱默生的影响，梭罗也是一位者。
梭罗曾经旅行到过（Cape Cod）、阿基奥科楚科（Agiokochuk） 和缅因州的（Mt. Katahdin）。其中的缅因州之行到过卡塔丁（Ktaadn）、车桑库克（Chesuncook）和培诺伯斯科特河（Penobscot River）的东支。
梭罗因患肺病1862年5月6日(44岁)死于他的家乡康科德城，并被葬于马萨诸赛州康科德城的斯利培山谷公墓（Sleepy Hollow Cemetery）。
1845年7月4日美国独立日这天，28岁的梭罗独自一人来到距康科德两英里的瓦尔登湖畔，建了一个小木屋住了下来。并在此之后根据自己在瓦尔登湖的生活观察与思考，整理并发表了两本著作，即《康考德和梅里马克河上的一周》（A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers）和《瓦尔登湖》（Walden）。
在瓦尔登湖生活期间，因为梭罗反对黑奴制（Negro Slavery）拒交“人头税”而被捕入狱。虽然他只在狱中蹲了一宿就被友人在未经他本人同意的情况下，替他代交了税款保其出狱，但这一夜却激发他思考了许多问题。出来后曾有一些市民问他这样一个问题，为什么有许多人宁愿坐牢也不愿意交税。为解释这一问题，他结合自己的亲身体验，写成了著名的政论《抵制国民政府》（Resistance to Civil Government，后改名为Civil Disobedience）。他所宣传的这种依靠个人的力量，“非暴力抵抗”的斗争形式对印度的甘地和美国黑人领袖马丁·路德·金产生了很大的影响。
1947年，梭罗结束了离群索居的生活，回到原来的村落。他仍然保持着自己简朴的生活风格，将主要精力投入写作、讲课和观察当地的植物动物。有时候为了得到极其微薄的生活费用，才偶尔离开村子到父亲的铅笔厂工作一些日子。梭罗卒于1862年5月6日，时年44岁。当时在同时代人的眼中，他只不过是一个观念偏执行为怪异的人，一个爱默生的追求者而已。一直到世纪之交他及其著作才得到了广泛和深刻的认识。
梭罗于1837年刚进大学时就曾言，他要将圣经中关于一周工作六天休息一天的教义，改为工作一天休息六天。他在瓦尔登湖的生活经历实现了这一愿望。在那里他仅花28美元多一点儿就建成起了自己的栖身的小木屋，每星期花27美分就足以维持生活。为维持这样简朴的生活，他一年只须工作六个星期就可以挣足一年的生活费用，剩下的46个星期去做自己喜欢做的事情。他没有将这宝贵时光浪费掉，而是把它奉献给写作和自然研究。也许有人会说梭罗太懒，终其一生也并未做出任何惊天动地的事业，但是如果你能注意到他在短暂的一生中创作了二十多部一流的散文集时，就会对他的才华和勤奋发出由衷的赞赏。
School/tradition Transcendentalism
Main interests Natural history
Notable ideas Abolitionism, tax resistance, development criticism, civil disobedience, conscientious objection, direct action, environmentalism, nonviolent resistance, simple living
Influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Influenced Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, William O. Douglas, Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy
Henry David Thoreau (12 July 1817 – 6 May 1862; born David Henry Thoreau)[1] was an American author, naturalist, transcendentalist, tax resister, development critic, philosopher, and abolitionist who is best known for Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay, Civil Disobedience, an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state.
Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry total over 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions were his writings on natural history and philosophy, where he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern day environmentalism.
He was a lifelong abolitionist, delivering lectures that attacked the Fugitive Slave Law while praising the writings of Wendell Phillips and defending the abolitionist John Brown. Thoreau’s philosophy of nonviolent resistance influenced the political thoughts and actions of such later figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Thoreau is sometimes cited as an individualist anarchist[2][3] as well as an inspiration to anarchists. Though Civil Disobedience calls for improving rather than abolishing government — “I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government”[4] — the direction of this improvement aims at anarchism: “‘That government is best which governs not at all;’ and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.”[4]
著作列表Works
* The Service (1840)* A Walk to Wachusett (1842)
* Paradise (to be) Regained (1843)
* The Landlord (1843) [1] [2]
* Sir Walter Raleigh (1844)
* Herald of Freedom (1844)
* Wendell Phillips Before the Concord Lyceum (1845)
* Reform and the Reformers (1846-8)
* Thomas Carlyle and His Works (1847)
* 康科德河和梅里麦克河上的一个星期A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849，1839年？) [3]
* 论公民的不服从权利Resistance to Civil Government, or Civil Disobedience (1849) [4]
* An Excursion to Canada (1853) [5]
* 马萨诸塞州的奴隶制度Slavery in Massachusetts (1854)
* 瓦尔登湖Walden (1854)
* 为约翰·布朗上校请愿A Plea for Captain John Brown (1859，1860年？)
* Remarks After the Hanging of John Brown (1859)
* The Last Days of John Brown (1860)
* Walking (1861) [6] [7]
* Autumnal Tints (1862) [8]
* Wild Apples: The History of the Apple Tree (1862) [9][10]
* Excursions (1863) [11]
* Life Without Principle (1863) [12] [13]
* Night and Moonlight (1863) [14] [15]
* The Highland Light (1864) [16]
* 缅因森林The Maine Woods (1864) [17] [18]
* 科德角Cape Cod (1865) [19]
* Letters to Various Persons (1865) [20]
* A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers (1866) [21]
* 马萨诸塞州的早春Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881)
* Summer (1884) [22]
* Winter (1888) [23]
* Autumn (1892) [24]
* Misellanies (1894)
* Familiar Letters of Henry David Thoreau (1894) [25]
* Poems of Nature (1895)
* Some Unpublished Letters of Henry D. and Sophia E. Thoreau (1898)
* 梭罗最初与最后的旅行（最近发现于梭罗未发表的日记和手稿中）The First and Last Journeys of Thoreau (1905) Vol. 1 Vol. 2
* Journal of Henry David Thoreau (1906) [26]
站外链接
* Wikiquote - Quotes by Henry David Thoreau* 一本静静的书—《瓦尔登湖》译序 徐迟（其中有梭罗的生平介绍）（http://www.booker.com.cn/gb/paper17/8/class001700003/hwz59324.htm）
* 梭罗 斯蒂芬·哈恩 著，王艳芳 译，彭国华 校 （其中有梭罗生平的详细介绍）（http://www.cass.net.cn/chinese/s14_zxs/facu/wangyanfang/zhicheng/shu.htm）
* 瓦尔登湖—林中生活散记 句承蜩（http://www.booker.com.cn/gb/paper18/47/class001800010/hwz212736.htm）
Early life and education
Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts to John Thoreau (a pencil maker) and Cynthia Dunbar. His paternal grandfather was of French origin and born in Jersey.[5] His maternal grandfather, Asa Dunbar, was known for leading Harvard's 1766 student 'Butter Rebellion'[6] the first recorded student protest in the United States.[7] David Henry was named after a recently deceased paternal uncle, David Thoreau. He did not become “Henry David” until after college, although he never petitioned to make a legal name change.[8] He had two older siblings, Helen and John Jr., and a younger sister, Sophia.[9] Thoreau’s birthplace still exists on Virginia Road in Concord and is currently the focus of preservation efforts. The house is original, but it now stands about 100 yards away from its first site.Bronson Alcott and Thoreau's aunt both wrote that “Thoreau” is pronounced like the word “thorough”, whose standard American pronunciation rhymes with “furrow”.[10] In appearance he was homely, with a nose that he called “my most prominent feature.”[11] Of his face, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote: '[Thoreau] is as ugly as sin, long-nosed, queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and rustic, though courteous manners, corresponding very well with such an exterior. But his ugliness is of an honest and agreeable fashion, and becomes him much better than beauty.'[12] Thoreau also wore a neck-beard for many years, which he insisted many women found attractive. However, Louisa May Alcott reportedly mentioned to Emerson that Thoreau's facial hair 'will most assuredly deflect amorous advances and preserve the man's virtue in perpetuity.'[13]
Thoreau studied at Harvard University between 1833 and 1837. He lived in Hollis Hall and took courses in rhetoric, classics, philosophy, mathematics, and science. Legend states that Thoreau refused to pay the five-dollar fee for a Harvard diploma. In fact, the master's degree he declined to purchase had no academic merit: Harvard College offered it to graduates 'who proved their physical worth by being alive three years after graduating, and their saving, earning, or inheriting quality or condition by having Five Dollars to give the college.'[14] His comment was: “Let every sheep keep its own skin.”
Return to Concord: 1837-1841
During a leave of absence from Harvard in 1835, Thoreau taught school in Canton, Massachusetts. After graduating in 1837, he joined the faculty of Concord Academy, but he refused to administer corporal punishment and the school board soon dismissed him. He and his brother John then opened a grammar school in Concord in 1838. They introduced several progressive concepts, including nature walks and visits to local shops and businesses. The school ended when John became fatally ill from tetanus in 1842.[15]Upon graduation Thoreau returned home to Concord, where he befriended Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson took a paternal and at times patronizing interest in Thoreau, advising the young man and introducing him to a circle of local writers and thinkers, including Ellery Channing, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne and his son Julian, who was a boy at the time. Of the many prominent authors who lived in Concord, Thoreau was the only town native. Emerson referred to him as the man of Concord.
Emerson constantly urged Thoreau to contribute essays and poems to a quarterly periodical, The Dial, and Emerson lobbied with editor Margaret Fuller to publish those writings. Thoreau’s first essay published there was Natural History of Massachusetts; half book review, half natural history essay, it appeared in 1842. It consisted of revised passages from his journal, which he had begun keeping at Emerson’s suggestion. The first entry on 22 October 1837 reads, “‘What are you doing now?’ he asked. ‘Do you keep a journal?’ So I make my first entry today.”
Thoreau was a philosopher of nature and its relation to the human condition. In his early years he followed Transcendentalism, a loose and eclectic idealist philosophy advocated by Emerson, Fuller, and Alcott. They held that an ideal spiritual state transcends, or goes beyond, the physical and empirical, and that one achieves that insight via personal intuition rather than religious doctrine. In their view, Nature is the outward sign of inward spirit, expressing the “radical correspondence of visible things and human thoughts,” as Emerson wrote in Nature (1836).
（1967 U.S. postage stamp honoring Thoreau.）
On 18 April 1841, Thoreau moved into the Emerson House.[16] There, from 1841-1844, he served as the children’s tutor, editorial assistant, and repair man/gardener. For a few months in 1843, he moved to the home of William Emerson on Staten Island, tutoring the family sons while writing for New York periodicals, aided in part by his future literary representative Horace Greeley.
Thoreau returned to Concord and worked in his family's pencil factory, which he would continue to do for most of his adult life. He rediscovered the process to make a good pencil out of inferior graphite by using clay as the binder; this invention improved upon graphite found in New Hampshire in 1821 by Charles Dunbar. (The process of mixing graphite and clay, known as the Conté process, was patented by Nicolas-Jacques Conté in 1795.) Later, Thoreau converted the factory to produce plumbago (graphite), used to ink typesetting machines.[17] Frequent contact with minute particles of graphite may have weakened his lungs already damaged by tuberculosis.
Once back in Concord, Thoreau went through a restless period. In April 1844 he and his friend Edward Hoar accidentally set a fire that consumed 300 acres of Walden Woods.[18] He spoke often of finding a farm to buy or lease, which he felt would give him a means to support himself while also providing enough solitude to write his first book.Civil disobedience and the Walden years: 1845–1849 （A reproduction of Thoreau’s cabin with a statue of Thoreau.）
Thoreau embarked on a two-year experiment in simple living on 4 July 1845, when he moved to a small self-built house on land owned by Emerson in a second-growth forest around the shores of Walden Pond. The house was not in wilderness but at the edge of town, 1.5 miles (2.4 km) from his family home.
On 24 or 25 July 1846, Thoreau ran into the local tax collector, Sam Staples, who asked him to pay six years of delinquent poll taxes. Thoreau refused because of his opposition to the Mexican-American War and slavery, and he spent a night in jail because of this refusal. (The next day Thoreau was freed, over his protests, when his aunt paid his taxes.[19]) The experience had a strong impact on Thoreau. In January and February of 1848, he delivered lectures on 'The Rights and Duties of the Individual in relation to Government”[20] explaining his tax resistance at the Concord Lyceum. Bronson Alcott attended the lecture, and wrote in his journal on 26 January,
Heard Thoreau’s lecture before the Lyceum on the relation of the individual to the State — an admirable statement of the rights of the individual to self-government, and an attentive audience. His allusions to the Mexican War, to Mr. Hoar’s expulsion from Carolina, his own imprisonment in Concord Jail for refusal to pay his tax, Mr. Hoar’s payment of mine when taken to prison for a similar refusal, were all pertinent, well considered, and reasoned. I took great pleasure in this deed of Thoreau’s.[21]
Thoreau revised the lecture into an essay entitled Resistance to Civil Government (also known as Civil Disobedience). In May 1849 it was published by Elizabeth Peabody in the Aesthetic Papers.
Thoreau is frequently quoted as espousing that the true place for a just man is in prison. He in fact actually writes in Civil Disobedience, 'Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.'[22]
At Walden Pond, he completed a first draft of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, an elegy to his brother, John, that described their 1839 trip to the White Mountains. Thoreau did not find a publisher for this book and instead printed 1,000 copies at his own expense, though less than 300 sold.[23] Thoreau self-published on the advice of Emerson, using Emerson’s own publisher Munroe, who did little to publicize the book. Its failure put Thoreau into debt that took years to pay off, and Emerson’s flawed advice caused a schism between the friends that never entirely healed.
In August 1846, Thoreau briefly left Walden to make a trip to Mount Katahdin in Maine, a journey later recorded in “Ktaadn,” the first part of The Maine Woods.
Thoreau left Walden Pond on 6 September 1847.[24] Over several years, he worked to pay off his debts and also continuously revised his manuscript. In 1854, he published Walden, or Life in the Woods, recounting the two years, two months, and two days he had spent at Walden Pond. The book compresses that time into a single calendar year, using the passage of four seasons to symbolize human development. Part memoir and part spiritual quest, Walden at first won few admirers, but today critics regard it as a classic American book that explores natural simplicity, harmony, and beauty as models for just social and cultural conditions.
Late years: 1851-1862
（Henry David Thoreau, photograph published circa 1879）In 1851, Thoreau became increasingly fascinated with natural history and travel/expedition narratives. He read avidly on botany and often wrote observations on this topic into his Journal. He greatly admired William Bartram and Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle. He kept detailed observations on Concord's nature lore, recording everything from how the fruit ripened over time to the fluctuating depths of Walden Pond and the days certain birds migrated. The point of this task was to “anticipate” the seasons of nature, in his words.
He became a land surveyor, and continued to write increasingly detailed natural history observations about the 26 mile'sup2; (67 km'sup2;) township in his Journal, a two-million word document he kept for 24 years. He also kept a series of separate notebooks, and these observations became the source for Thoreau's late natural history writings, such as Autumnal Tints, The Succession of Trees, and Wild Apples, an essay bemoaning the destruction of indigenous and wild apple species.
Until the 1970s, Thoreau’s late pursuits were dismissed by literary critics as amateur science and philosophy. With the rise of environmental history and ecocriticism, several new readings of this matter began to emerge, showing Thoreau to be both a philosopher and an analyst of ecological patterns in fields and woodlots. For instance, his late essay, 'The Succession of Forest Trees,' shows that he used experimentation and analysis to explain how forests regenerate after fire or human destruction, through dispersal by seed-bearing winds or animals.
He traveled to Quebec once, Cape Cod four times, and Maine three times; these landscapes inspired his 'excursion' books, A Yankee in Canada, Cape Cod, and The Maine Woods, in which travel itineraries frame his thoughts about geography, history and philosophy. Other travels took him southwest to Philadelphia and New York City in 1854, and west across the Great Lakes region in 1861, visiting Niagara Falls, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Mackinac Island.[25]
After John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry, many prominent voices in the abolitionist movement distanced themselves from Brown, or damned him with faint praise. Thoreau was disgusted by this, and composed a speech — A Plea for Captain John Brown — which was uncompromising in its defense of Brown and his actions. Thoreau’s speech proved persuasive: first the abolitionist movement began to accept Brown as a martyr, and by the time of the American Civil War entire armies of the North would literally be singing Brown’s praises. As a contemporary biographer of John Brown put it: “If, as Alfred Kazin suggests, without John Brown there would have been no Civil War, we would add that without the Concord Transcendentalists, John Brown would have had little cultural impact.”[26]
Death
（Thoreau family graves at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery）Thoreau first contracted tuberculosis in 1835 and suffered from it sporadically over his life. In 1859, following a late night excursion to count the rings of tree stumps during a rain storm, he became ill with bronchitis. His health declined over three years with brief periods of remission, until he eventually became bedridden. Recognizing the terminal nature of his disease, Thoreau spent his last years revising and editing his unpublished works, particularly The Maine Woods and Excursions, and petitioning publishers to print revised editions of A Week and Walden. He also wrote letters and journal entries until he became too weak to continue. His friends were alarmed at his diminished appearance and fascinated by his tranquil acceptance of death. When his aunt Louisa asked him in his last weeks if he had made his peace with God, Thoreau responded quite simply: “I did not know we had ever quarreled.” He died on 6 May 1862 at the age of 44.
Originally buried in the Dunbar family plot, he and members of his immediate family were eventually moved to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts. Emerson wrote the eulogy spoken at his funeral. Thoreau’s friend Ellery Channing published his first biography, Thoreau the Poet-Naturalist, in 1873, and Channing and another friend Harrison Blake edited some poems, essays, and journal entries for posthumous publication in the 1890s. Thoreau’s Journal, often mined but largely unpublished at his death, first appeared in 1906 and helped to build his modern reputation. A new and greatly expanded edition of the Journal is underway, published by Princeton University Press. Today, Thoreau is regarded as one of the foremost American writers, both for the modern clarity of his prose style and the prescience of his views on nature and politics. His memory is honored by the international Thoreau Society, the oldest and largest society devoted to an American author.
Beliefs
（Thoreau memorial at Library Way, New York City.）Thoreau was an early advocate of recreational hiking and canoing, of conserving natural resources on private land, and of preserving wilderness as public land. Thoreau was also one of the first American supporters of Darwin's theory of evolution. He was not a strict vegetarian, though he said he preferred that diet[27] and advocated it as a means of self-improvement. He wrote in Walden: 'The practical objection to animal food in my case was its uncleanness; and besides, when I had caught and cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me essentially. It was insignificant and unnecessary, and cost more than it came to. A little bread or a few potatoes would have done as well, with less trouble and filth.'[28]Thoreau neither rejected civilization nor fully embraced wilderness. Instead he sought a middle ground, the pastoral realm that integrates both nature and culture. The wildness he enjoyed was the nearby swamp or forest, and he preferred “partially cultivated country.” His idea of being “far in the recesses of the wilderness” of Maine was to “travel the logger’s path and the Indian trail,” but he also hiked on pristine untouched land. In the essay 'Henry David Thoreau, Philosopher' Roderick Nash writes: 'Thoreau left Concord in 1846 for the first of three trips to northern Maine. His expectations were high because he hoped to find genuine, primeval America. But contact with real wilderness in Maine affected him far differently than had the idea of wilderness in Concord. Instead of coming out of the woods with a deepened appreciation of the wilds, Thoreau felt a greater respect for civilization and realized the necessity of balance.'[29]
On alcohol, Thoreau wrote: 'I would fain keep sober always... I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man; wine is not so noble a liquor... Of all ebriosity, who does not prefer to be intoxicated by the air he breathes?'[28]
Influence
（A bust of Thoreau from the Hall of Fame for Great Americans at the Bronx Community College.）Thoreau’s writings had far reaching influences on many public figures. Political leaders and reformers like Mahatma Gandhi, President John F. Kennedy, civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr., Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, and Russian author Leo Tolstoy all spoke of being strongly affected by Thoreau’s work, particularly Civil Disobedience. So did many artists and authors including Edward Abbey, Willa Cather, Marcel Proust, William Butler Yeats, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, E. B. White, and Frank Lloyd Wright and naturalists like John Burroughs, John Muir, E.O. Wilson, Edwin Way Teale, Joseph Wood Krutch , B.F Skinner, and David Brower.[30] Anarchist and feminist Emma Goldman also appreciated Thoreau, and referred to him as “the greatest American anarchist”.
Mahatma Gandhi first read Walden in 1906 while working as a civil rights activist in Johannesburg, South Africa. He told American reporter Webb Miller, '[Thoreau's] ideas influenced me greatly. I adopted some of them and recommended the study of Thoreau to all of my friends who were helping me in the cause of Indian Independence. Why I actually took the name of my movement from Thoreau's essay 'On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,' written about 80 years ago.'[31]
Martin Luther King, Jr. noted in his Autobiography that his first encounter with the idea of non-violent resistance was reading 'On Civil Disobedience' in 1944 while attending Morehouse College. He wrote in his autobiography that it was
Here, in this courageous New Englander's refusal to pay his taxes and his choice of jail rather than support a war that would spread slavery's territory into Mexico, I made my first contact with the theory of nonviolent resistance. Fascinated by the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil system, I was so deeply moved that I reread the work several times.
I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. No other person has been more eloquent and passionate in getting this idea across than Henry David Thoreau. As a result of his writings and personal witness, we are the heirs of a legacy of creative protest. The teachings of Thoreau came alive in our civil rights movement; indeed, they are more alive than ever before. Whether expressed in a sit-in at lunch counters, a freedom ride into Mississippi, a peaceful protest in Albany, Georgia, a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, these are outgrowths of Thoreau's insistence that evil must be resisted and that no moral man can patiently adjust to injustice.[32]
The University of Michigan's New England Literature Program is an experiential literature and writing program run through the university's Department of English Language and Literature which was started in the 1970's by professors Alan Howes and Walter Clark. Howes and Clark called upon Thoreauvian ideals of nature, independence and community to create an academic program modeled after Thoreau's experiment at Walden Pond. Today, students at NELP study Thoreau's work — as well as that of several other New England writers from the 19th and 20th centuries — in relative isolation on Sebago Lake in Raymond, Maine.
American Psychologist B. F. Skinner wrote that he carried a copy of Thoreau's Walden with him in his youth[33] and, in 1945, wrote Walden Two, a fictional utopia about 1,000 members of a community living together inspired by the life of Thoreau.[34]
Criticism
Thoreau was not without his critics. Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson judged Thoreau’s endorsement of living alone in natural simplicity, apart from modern society, to be a mark of effeminacy:…Thoreau’s content and ecstasy in living was, we may say, like a plant that he had watered and tended with womanish solicitude; for there is apt to be something unmanly, something almost dastardly, in a life that does not move with dash and freedom, and that fears the bracing contact of the world. In one word, Thoreau was a skulker. He did not wish virtue to go out of him among his fellow-men, but slunk into a corner to hoard it for himself. He left all for the sake of certain virtuous self-indulgences.[35]
However, English novelist George Eliot, writing in the Westminster Review, characterized such critics as uninspired and narrow-minded:
People — very wise in their own eyes — who would have every man’s life ordered according to a particular pattern, and who are intolerant of every existence the utility of which is not palpable to them, may pooh-pooh Mr. Thoreau and this episode in his history, as unpractical and dreamy.
See also
* The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, a project that aims to provide accurate texts of Thoreau's works* Concord Museum, which contains many of Thoreau's possessions
* The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail, a two-act play by Robert Edwin Lee and Jerome Lawrence.
References
1. Biography of Henry David Thoreau, American Poems (2000-2007 Gunnar Bengtsson).2. Johnson, Ellwood. The Goodly Word: The Puritan Influence in America Literature, Clements Publishing, 2005, p. 138.
3. Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, edited by Edwin Robert Anderson Seligman, Alvin Saunders Johnson, 1937, p. 12.
4. a b Thoreau, H. D. Resistance to Civil Government
5. Ancestors of Mary Ann Gillam and Stephen Old
6. History of the Fraternity System
7. Trivia-Library
8. Henry David Thoreau, Meet the Writers, Barnes ' Noble.com
9. Biography of Henry David Thoreau, American Poems (2000-2007 Gunnar Bengtsson)
10. THUR-oh or Thor-OH? And How Do We Know? Thoreau Reader
11. Thoreau, H.D. Cape Cod
12. American Notebooks Nathaniel Hawthorne
13. Colman, William, et al, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson 16 vols. (Cambridge, Mass 1960-)
14. 'Thoreau's Diploma'. American Literature Vol. 17, May 1945. 174-175.
15. Dean, Bradley P. 'A Thoreau Chronology'.
16. Cheevers, Susan (2006). American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau; Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work. Detroit: Thorndike Press. Large print edition. p. 90. ISBN 078629521X.
17. Conrad, Randall. (Fall 2005). 'The Machine in the Wetland: Re-imagining Thoreau's Plumbago-Grinder'. Thoreau Society Bulletin (253).
18. A Chronology of Thoreau's Life, with Events of the Times, The Thoreau Project, Calliope Film Resources, accessed 11th June 2007
19. Rosenwald, Lawrence. 'The Theory, Practice ' Influence of Thoreau's Civil Disobedience'. William Cain, ed. A Historical Guide to Henry David Thoreau. Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 2006.
20. Thoreau, H. D. letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson 23 February 1848
21. Alcott, Bronson. Journals. Boston: Little, Brown, 1938.
22. Thoreau's Civil Disobedience - 2
23. Cheevers, Susan (2006). American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau; Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work. Detroit: Thorndike Press. Large print edition. p. 234. ISBN 078629521X.
24. Cheevers, Susan (2006). American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau; Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work. Detroit: Thorndike Press. Large print edition. p. 244. ISBN 078629521X.
25. Henry David Thoreau, The Annotated Walden (1970), Philip Van Doren Stern, ed., pp. 96, 132
26. Reynolds, David S. John Brown, Abolitionist Knopf (2005), p. 4
27. Brooks, Van Wyck. The Flowering of New England. New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, Inc., 1952. p. 310
28. a b Cheevers, Susan (2006). American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau; Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work. Detroit: Thorndike Press. Large print edition. p. 241. ISBN 078629521X.
29. http://www.wsu.edu/~hughesc/thoreau.htm'Henry David Thoreau, Philosopher' by Roderick Nash
30. Kifer, Ken Analysis and Notes on Walden: Henry Thoreau’s Text with Adjacent Thoreauvian Commentary
31. Miller, Webb. I Found No Peace. Garden City, 1938. 238-239
32. King, M.L. Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. chapter two
33. Skinner, B. F. A Matter of Consequences
34. Skinner, B. F. Walden Two (1948)
35. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 'Henry David Thoreau: His Character and Opinions'. Cornhill Magazine. June 1880.
[edit] Further reading
* Henry David Thoreau: A Week, Walden, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod (Robert F. Sayre, ed.) (Library of America, 1985) ISBN 978-0-94045027-1
* Henry David Thoreau: Collected Essays and Poems (Elizabeth Hall Witherell, ed.) (Library of America, 2001) ISBN 978-1-88301195-6
* Henry David Thoreau: The Price of Freedom: Excerpts from Thoreau’s Journals ISBN 978-1434805522
* Bode, Carl. Best of Thoreau's Journals. Southern Illinois University Press. 1967.
* Botkin, Daniel. No Man's Garden.
* Dassow Walls, Laura. Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and 19th Century Science. University of Wisconsin Press. 1995. ISBN 978-0-29914740-2
* Dean, Bradley P. ed., Letters to a Spiritual Seeker. New York: W. W. Norton ' Company, 2004.
* Harding, Walter. The Days of Henry Thoreau. Princeton University Press, 1982.
* Hendrix, George. 'The Influence of Thoreau's 'Civil Disobedience' on Gandhi's Satyagraha'. The New England Quarterly. 1956.
* Howarth, William. The Book of Concord: Thoreau's Life as a Writer. Viking Press, 1982.
* Meyerson, Joel et al. The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau. Cambridge University Press. 1995.
* Nash, Roderick. Henry David Thoreau, Philosopher.
* Parrington, Vernon. Main Current in American Thought. V 2 online. 1927.
* Petroski, Henry. H. D. Thoreau, Engineer. American Heritage of Invention and Technology, Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 8-16.
External links
Texts* The Thoreau Reader. The annotated works of Henry David Thoreau.
* Thoreau's Life ' Writings, at the Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods.
* Works by Henry David Thoreau at Project Gutenberg. Text and HTML.
* Works by Henry David Thoreau at Internet Archive. Scanned books.
* Works by Henry David Thoreau at Google Books. Scanned books.
* Thoreau's Journal Drippings; a Monthly Digest of Excerpts from Thoreau's Journal
* Excerpts from Thoreau’s Journals (relating to political philosophy)
* Poems of Thoreau
Other
* This Date From Henry David Thoreau's Journal
* Who He Was ' Why He Matters — by Randall Conrad
* http://hdthoreau.com
* The Birthplace of Thoreau
* The Blog of Henry David Thoreau
* The Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods
* World Wide Waldens at The Walden Woods Project
* Henry David Thoreau Online The Works and Life of Henry D. Thoreau
* Henry David Thoreau (“The Transcendentalists”)
* The American Transcendentalist Web
* Thoreau Project at Calliope
* The Thoreau Society
* The Thoreau Edition
* Concordance to works of Thoreau at Victorian Literary Studies Archive
* John Updike, “A Sage for All Seasons” — courtesy of the UK Guardian, an edited extract from the introduction to Updike’s new edition of Walden
* Henry David Thoreau entry at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy by Rick Anthony Furtak, 2005-06-30
* Henry Thoreau: Transcendental Economist from Vernon L. Parrington’s Main Currents in American Thought
* Stephen Ells’s Thoreau research page
* The European Thoreau web page: multilingual resources for Thoreauvians
* Thoreau's trails
* Strike The Root, a website that draws its inspiration from Henry D. Thoreau.