Life & Background
Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1817 and spent almost his whole life there, working in the family pencil business, surveying, and teaching. He went to Harvard, briefly ran a school with his brother John, and became Emerson's protégé and handyman, living in his house for periods. In 1845 he built a cabin on Emerson's land at Walden Pond and lived there for two years, two months, and two days. In 1846 he was jailed for a night for refusing to pay a poll tax, in protest against slavery and the war with Mexico; an aunt paid it against his wishes. He was an active abolitionist and defended John Brown publicly when almost nobody would. He contracted tuberculosis and died in 1862 at forty-four, leaving journals of over two million words.
Walden
An account of the two years Thoreau spent in a one-room cabin he built at Walden Pond, compressed into a single cycle of seasons from summer to the following spring. The opening chapter, Economy, is a detailed accounting of what the experiment cost — twenty-eight dollars and change for the house — and an attack on the labour people perform to sustain possessions they do not need, arguing that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. Subsequent chapters treat reading, solitude, visitors, the bean-field, the pond itself surveyed and measured, winter animals, and the ice cut and shipped as far as India. The book ends with the thaw, and with the parable of a beautiful insect emerging from a table made of wood cut sixty years before.
Walden is not a wilderness book — the cabin was a mile from town and Thoreau went home for dinner — and reading it as one misses the point, which is an argument about economy conducted as a demonstration. The prose works by pun, paradox, and deliberate exaggeration, and its structure is seasonal so that renewal is formal rather than asserted. Civil Disobedience, written after his night in jail, makes the companion argument in the political register: that a citizen's obligation is to conscience before law, and that under a government which imprisons unjustly the true place for a just man is prison. Its afterlife is extraordinary, having been read closely by Gandhi in South Africa and by Martin Luther King.
Why Thoreau Matters
Thoreau produced the founding text of American nature writing and environmental thought, and, in Civil Disobedience, one of the most consequential political essays ever written — its influence on Gandhi's satyagraha and on the American civil rights movement makes it a standard reference in Indian syllabi as well as American ones. Walden's critique of consumption and work has been continuously rediscovered, and his journals are increasingly read as his major achievement.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers1849
- Civil Disobedience1849
- Walden1854
- Slavery in Massachusetts1854
- A Plea for Captain John Brown1859
- Walking1862
- The Journal1837–61