Henry David Thoreau

At 44 years old, Henry David Thoreau has this physical status:

Henry David Thoreau (see name pronunciation; 1817-1972) was an American essayist, poet, and scholar.

Thoreau, a leading transcendentalist, is best known for his book Walden, a reflection on simple living in natural surroundings, and his book "Civil Disobedience" (originally published as "Resistance to Civil Government), a call for an end of obstructing an unjust state. Thoreau's books, research, journals, journals, and poetry total more than 20 volumes.

Among his lasting contributions are his books on natural history and philosophy, in which he envisioned the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern-day environmentalism.

His literary style weaves close observation of nature, personal experience, emphasized rhetoric, symbolic roots, and historical lore, while still retaining a poetic sensibility, philosophical lucidity, and Yankee attention to practical details.

He was also deeply interested in the prospect of surviving in the face of violent forces, cultural transition, and natural decay; at the same time, he argued for discarded waste and illusion in order to discover life's true needs.

Thoreau's philosophy of civil disobedience later inspired Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.Thoreau is often described as an anarchist.

"Civil Disobedience" tends to suggest that rather than abolishing the government, "I ask for more than no government, but at least a better government"—the direction of this change points toward anarchism: "That government is the most effective, not at all."

Life

Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, into the "most New England family" of John Thoreau, a pencil maker, and Cynthia Dunbar. His father was of French Protestant descent. His paternal grandfather was born on Jersey's royal dependency island. Asa Dunbar, his maternal grandfather, accompanied Harvard's 1766 student "Butter Rebellion," the first documented student protest in the American colonies. David Henry was named after his recently deceased paternal uncle, David Thoreau. After finishing college, he began to call himself Henry David; he never applied for a name change.

Helen and John Jr., both older siblings, and Sophia Thoreau, a younger sister. None of the children were married. Helen (1812–1849) died of tuberculosis at the age of 37. When shaving himself, John Jr. (1814–1842) died at the age of 27, of tetanus. Henry David (1817–1862) died of tuberculosis at the age of 44. Sophia (1819–1876) lived with him for 14 years, dying of tuberculosis at the age 56 years old.

He studied at Harvard College from 1833 to 1837. He lived in Hollis Hall and took classes in rhetoric, classics, philosophy, mathematics, and science. He was a member of the Institute of 1770 (now the Hasty Pudding Club). Thoreau refused to pay the five-dollar tuition (approximately equivalent to $136 in 2021) for a Harvard diploma, according to legend. In fact, the master's degree he refused to buy had no academic merit: Harvard College offered it to graduates "who demonstrated their physical fitness by being alive three years after graduation, and their saving, earning, or passing quality or condition by having Five Dollars to offer the college." "Let every sheep keep its own skin," he said in a reference to the use of sheepskin vellum for diplomas.

On Virginia Road in Concord, Thoreau's birthplace is still exists. The Thoreau Farm Trust, a non-profit group, has renovated the house, which is now open to the public.

Thoreau was not interested in the traditional professions open to college graduates in 1835—law, industry, and medicine—did not capture his curiosity: he took a leave of absence from Harvard in 1835, while studying at a school in Canton, Massachusetts, working for two years at a younger version of today's Colonial Inn in Concord. His grandfather owned the earliest of the three buildings that were later combined. Thoreau, who attended the Concord public school in 1837, resigned after a few weeks rather than administer corporal punishment. 25 In 1838, He and his brother John opened Concord Academy, a grammar school in Concord, England.: 25 They introduced nature walks and visits to local stores and businesses. In 1842, the school was suspended after John became fatally sick of tetanus after shaving himself. He died in Henry's arms.

Following graduation, Thoreau returned to Concord, where he had met Ralph Waldo Emerson through a mutual friend. Emerson, who was 14 years old, took a paternal and at times patronizing interest in Thoreau, including Ellery Channing, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was a child at the time.

Emerson pleaded with Thoreau to contribute essays and poems to The Dial's quarterly periodical, and Margaret Fuller, editor, was lobbied to publish those articles. "Aulus Persius Flaccus," an essay about the Roman poet and satirist, first published in The Dial in July 1840, was Thoreau's first essay. It consisted of rewritten passages from his journal, which he had begun keeping at Emerson's suggestion. "What are you doing now?" the first journal entry, published on October 22, 1837. He asked.

'Do you keep a journal?'

So I make my first entry to-day."

Thoreau, a philosopher of nature and its connection to the human race. He adopted transcendentalism, a loose and eclectic idealist philosophy championed by Emerson, Fuller, and Alcott in his early years. According to them, an ideal spiritual condition transcends, or goes beyond, the physical and academic, and that one obtains that knowledge by personal intuition rather than religious doctrine. Nature is the outward sign of inward spirit, expressing the "critical correspondence of visible things and human thoughts," as Emerson wrote in Nature (1836).

Thoreau built the Emerson house on April 18, 1841. He served as the children's tutor from 1841 to 1844; he was also an editorial assistant, repairman, and gardener. He moved to Staten Island, tutored the family's children, and sought out literary men and journalists in the area, including future literary representative Horace Greeley.

: 68

Thoreau returned to Concord and worked in his family's pencil factory, which he would continue to do with his writing and other activities for the majority of his adult life. He rediscovered the art of making good pencils with inferior graphite by using clay as the binder. Thoreau's uncle, Charles Dunbar, was unable to use a graphite source found in New Hampshire in 1821. The process of mixing graphite and clay, also known as the Conté method, was developed by Nicolas-Jacques Conté in 1795. Tantiusques, a mine operated by Native Americans in Sturbridge, Massachusetts, was the company's other source of graphite. Thoreau converted the pencil factory to produce plumbago, a term for graphite at the time, which was used in the electrotyping process.

Thoreau, who had been back in Concord, was through a difficult time. Edward Hoar and his companion mistakenly started a fire that burned 300 acres (120 hectares) of Walden Woods in April 1844.

Thoreau felt the need to concentrate and concentrate more on his writing. Ellery Channing told Thoreau, "Go out on that, build yourself a hut, and begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive." There is no other alternative, but there is no other hope for you." Thoreau began a two-year journey in simple life on July 4, 1845, moving to a small house he had built on land owned by Emerson in a second growth forest along the shores of Walden Pond. Emerson had purchased 14 acres (5.7 hectares) of "a beautiful pasture and woodlot" which was 1 1+12 miles (2.5 kilometers) away from his family's house. Although he was there, he wrote "Thomas Carlyle and His Works," his only extended piece of literary criticism.

Thoreau ran into Sam Staples, the local tax collector, who ordered him to pay six years of delinquent poll taxes on July 24, 1846. Thoreau refused because of his opposition to the Mexican–American War and slavery, and he spent a night in prison as a result of this refusal. Thoreau was released the next day after someone, most likely to have been his aunt, paid the tax in defiance of his wishes. Thoreau had a major influence on him. He gave lectures on "The Rights and Duties of the Individual in connection with Government in January and February 1848," referring to his tax resistance at the Concord Lyceum. On January 26, Bronson Alcott attended the lecture, writing in his journal.

Thoreau converted the lecture into an essay titled "Resistance to Civil Government" (also known as "Civil Disobedience). In May 1849, Elizabeth Peabody's Aesthetic Papers appeared in it. Thoreau's version of Percy Shelley's principle in the political poem "The Mask of Anarchy" (1819), which begins with the vivid pictures of his time's unjustified positions of authority and then imagines the emergence of a new kind of social activism.

Thoreau, an elegy to his brother John, and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, a first draft of A Week on the White Mountains in 1839. Thoreau did not find a publisher for the book and instead produced 1,000 copies at his own expense; only about 300 were sold. 234 He self-published the book on Emerson's recommendation, using Munroe's publisher, Emerson, who did little to advertise the book.

Thoreau left Walden in Maine in August 1846 to travel to Mount Katahdin, Maine, in what later known as "Ktaadn," the first part of The Maine Woods.

244 Thoreau left Walden Pond on September 6, 1847. 144: At Emerson's behest, he returned to the Emerson house to help Emerson's wife, Lidian, manage the household while her husband was on a long trip to Europe. He continued to update the book of what he eventually published as Walden Pond, retracing the two years, two months, and two days he spent at Walden Pond over the years. The book converts time into a single calendar year, using the passage of the four seasons to represent human growth. Walden at first garnered few followers, but later critics regarded it as a classic American work that investigates natural simplicity, harmony, and beauty as models for both social and cultural conditions.

"In one book... he outlasts everything we've had in America," Robert Frost wrote of Thoreau.

"Wenn has become so popular and unread as the Bible has been a century and a half since its publication, and Thoreau has become such a hermit and hermit saint that the book threatens to be as revered and beloved as the Bible."

Thoreau grew out of Emerson's house in July 1848 and stayed at a house on nearby Belknap Street. He moved to 255 Main Street in 1850, where he lived until his death.

Thoreau and Channing traveled from Boston to Montreal and Quebec City in the summer of 1850. These will be Thoreau's only travels outside of the United States. It's as a result of this trip that he authored lectures that have since become A Yankee in Canada. All he got from this trip was "a cold," he said. In fact, this was a chance to compare American civic spirit and democratic values with a colony that was apparently ruled by illegitimate religious and military power. In Canada history, whereas his own country had its revolution, the country had failed to turn.

Thoreau became increasingly interested in natural history and travel stories in 1851. He loved botany and often wrote about it in his journal. He adored William Bartram and Charles Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle. He kept extensive records on Concord's nature lore, ranging from how the fruit ripened to the changing depths of Walden Pond and the days certain birds migrated. In his own words, the point of this assignment was to "anticipate" the seasons of nature.

In his journal, a two-million-word paper he kept for 24 years, he became a land surveyor and continued to write more detailed reports on the town's natural history. He also owned a notebook, and these observations, as well as "Autumnal Tints," "The Succession of Trees," and "Wild Apples," an essay describing the local wild apple species's demise.

Several new Thoreau readings appeared, showing him to have been both a philosopher and an ecologist, which was reflected in fields and woodlots, with a surge in environmental history and ecocriticism as academic disciplines. For example, "The Success of Forest Trees" explains how forests recover after fire or human extinction, by the dispersal of seeds by winds or animals. Thoreau, who was first introduced to a cattle show in Concord and regarded as his greatest contribution to ecology, explains how one species of tree can grow in a location where a different tree never did before. Squirrels are known to carry nuts far from the tree from which they fell to make stashes, according to him. If the squirrel dies or abandon the stash, these seeds are expected to germinate and grow. He credited the squirrel with providing a "great service" in the universe's economy.

He visited Canada East 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 travel plans on geography, history, and philosophy. During 1854, he travelled southwest to Philadelphia and New York City, then west through the Great Lakes region, including Niagara Falls, Detroit, Milwaukee, St. Paul, and Mackinac Island. He was provincial in his own travels, but he learned a lot about travel in other countries. He devoured all of the first-hand travel books available in his day, at a time when the last unmapped regions of the earth were being discovered. Magellan and James Cook, the arctic explorers John Franklin, Alexander Mackenzie, and William Parry; Alexander Mackenzie and William Parry; John Franklin, Alexander Mackenzie and Richard Burton on Africa; Lewis and Clark; hundreds of lesser-known explorers and literate travelers. Astonishing amounts of reading fueled his continuing curiosity about the people, cultures, faith, and natural history of the world, leaving the world's oldest documents as commentaries. In the local lab of his Concord experience, he processed everything he read. "Live at home like a traveler" is one of his most popular aphorisms.

Many leading figures in the abolitionist movement distanced themselves from Brown or dismissed him with faint praise after John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry. Thoreau was disgusted by this, and he delivered A Plea for Captain John Brown, which was uncompromising in its defense of Brown and his conduct. Thoreau's address was convincing: the abolitionist movement began to recognize Brown as a martyr, and by the time of the American Civil War, the North armies were literally singing Brown's praises. "If John Brown there would have been no Civil War without John Brown, we might assume that without the Concord Transcendentalists, John Brown would have had little cultural impact."

Thoreau contracted tuberculosis in 1835 and died as a result of it later in life. He became sick with bronchitis in 1860 after a late-night excursion to count the rings of tree stumps during a rainstorm. His health worsened, with brief periods of remission, and he eventually became bedridden. Thoreau, who noted the terminal character of his illness, spent his remaining years revising and editing his unpublished books, including The Maine Woods and Excursions, and petitioning publishers to publish updated versions of A Week and Walden. He wrote letters and journal entries until he was too young to continue. His friends were alarmed by his demise, and were fascinated by his contentious acceptance of death. When his uncle Louisa asked him in his last weeks if he had made his peace with God, he replied, "I didn't know we had ever quarreled."

Thoreau's last words, "Now comes good sailing," followed by two lone words, "moose" and "Indian," as he died. He died on May 6, 1862, at the age of 44. Amos Bronson Alcott planned the service and read selections from Thoreau's works, and Channing delivered a hymn. Emerson penned the eulogy at the funeral. Thoreau was buried in the Dunbar family's plot; his remains and those of his immediate family members were eventually relocated to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts.

Thoreau was a pioneer of recreational hiking and canoeing, of conserving natural resources on private property and protecting wilderness as public property. "Mr. Thoreau commanded the boat so smoothly, whether with two paddles or with one, it seemed instinctively, and therefore requires no physical effort to guide it." Nathaniel Hawthorne said after a ride with him.

He was not a strict vegetarian, but he said he preferred the diet and advocated it as a means of self-improvement. "The practical objection to animal food in my case was its uncleanness," he wrote in Walden, and, in addition,, the fish didn't appear to have fed me properly." It was small and unnecessary, and it cost more than it came to. A little bread or a few potatoes would have been as good, with less fuss and filth."

Thoreau neither deconstructed civilization nor fully accepted wilderness. Rather, he wanted a middle ground, a pastoral area that integrates both nature and culture. His conviction required that he be a didactic arbitrator between the wilderness he based so much on and the spreading mass of humanity in North America. He raged over the former, but then realised that a teacher must be close to those who need to hear what he wanted to hear. He loved the nearby swamp or forest, and he liked "partially cultivated country" in the region. His intention was to "travel the logger's path and the Indian trail," but he also hiked on pristine land in Maine. "Thoreau left Concord in 1846 for the first of three trips to northern Maine," Roderick Nash wrote in "Henry David Thoreau, Philosopher" (p. 5). His hopes were high because he aspired to find authentic, primeval America. However, experiencing real wilderness in Maine affected him much more than the one who had the vision of wilderness in Concord. Thoreau found a greater respect for civilization and understood the importance of balance rather than coming out of the woods with a deep appreciation of the wilds.

"I would fain keep sober forever," Thoreau said of alcohol. ... Water is apparently the only drink for a sage man, but wine is not so noble a spirit. "Of all ebriosity, who does not like to be intoxicated by the air he breathes."

Thoreau never married and was childless. He invited eighteen-year-old Ellen Sewall to her in 1840, but she refused him on the advice of her father.

Thoreau's sexuality has long been questioned, even among his contemporaries. He has been dubbed heterosexual, homosexual, or asexual by critics. There is no evidence to show that he had physical contact with any individual, man or woman. Some scholars have suggested that homogenetic sentiments in his writings and concluded that he was homosexual. Edmund Sewall, an eleven-year-old boy who had just spent five days in the Thoreau household in 1839, inspired the elegy "Sympathy." According to one scholar, he wrote the poem to Edmund because he couldn't bring himself to write it to Edmund's sister Anna and another that Thoreau's "emotional encounters with women are chronicled under a camouflage of masculine pronouns." The long-serving deposition in Walden by the French-Canadian woodchopper Alek Therien, which includes allusions to Achilles and Patroclus, has been described as an expression of conflicted desire. There is a sense of a mystery in some of Thoreau's books. "My friend is the apology for my life" he writes in his journal in 1840. The voids that my orbit has traversed are contained in him. Thoreau was heavily influenced by the moral reformers of his day, and this may have sparked anxiety and fear about sexual desire.

Thoreau was adamantly against slavery and actively promoted the abolitionist movement. He served as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, delivered lectures that condemned the Fugitive Slave Act, as well as the widespread belief of the day, favoring radical abolitionist militia leader John Brown and his party. Thoreau compared the American government to Pontius Pilate and likened Brown's execution to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ two weeks after the ill-fated attack on Harpers Ferry and in the weeks leading up to Brown's execution.

Thoreau wrote The Last Days of John Brown, describing the words and deeds of John Brown as noble and an example of heroism. He also slammed the newspaper editors who dismissed Brown's and his proposal as "crazy."

Thoreau, a feminist and individualist, was a proponent of limited government and individualism. Though he was optimistic that mankind might have, through self-improvement, the kind of government that "governs not at all," he wrote: "I ask for not at once no government but at least a better government."

Thoreau described the transition from absolute monarchy to limited monarchy as "a step toward true respect for the individual" and anticipations of more changes "towards recognizing and governing the rights of man." "There will never be a truly free and enlightened state until the state recognizes the individual as a king and sovereign power from which all its power and control are derived" is treated accordingly."

Thoreau can so strongly condemn the British government and Catholicism in A Yankee in Canada, that it is on this basis. Throgoe killed the people's sense of ingenuity and enterprise, according to Thoreau; the Canadian people had been reduced, according to him, to a perpetual childlike state. Despite the latest uprisings, he argued that there will be no revolution in the St. Lawrence River valley.

Though Thoreau believed that resistance to unjustified authority could be both violent (exemplified in his support for John Brown) and nonviolent (his own example of tax resistance displayed in Resistance to Civil Government); but, she should not have so much work to keep those swords shining and sharp." In addition, he debating the issue "Is it ever appropriate to have forcible resistance?" in a formal lyceum debate in 1841. "I am in favor of affirmation."

In the same way, his condemnation of the Mexican–American War did not stem from pacifism, but rather because he saw Mexico "unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army" as a way to expand the slave population.

Thoreau, an ambivalent about industrialization and capitalism, was ambivalent toward industrialization and capitalism. On one hand, he regarded trade as "unexpectedly safe and serene, inquiring, and unwearied" and expressed admiration for the country's associated cosmopolitanism.

On the other hand, he wrote disparagingly of the factory system:

Thoreau also supported bioregionalism, the protection of animals and wild plants, free trade, and sales for schools and highways. He condemned Native Americans' subordination, slavery, technological utopianism, consumerism, philistinism, mass entertainment, and frivolous application of technology.

Thoreau was inspired by Indian spiritual thought. Several overt references to India's sacred texts are found in Walden. For example, he writes in the first chapter ("Economy"), "How much more admirable the Bhagvat-Geeta is than all the East's ruins." Philosophical Perspective in the United States The American Philosophical Association lists him as one of several figures who "took a more pantheist or pandeist approach by rejecting beliefs of God as separate from the world," which was also a characteristic of Hinduism.

In addition, he equates Walden Pond with the sacred Ganges river in "The Pond in Winter."

Thoreau was aware that his Ganges images may have been inaccurate. At Walden Pond, he wrote about ice harvesting. He knew that New England's ice merchants were exporting ice to foreign ports, including Calcutta.

Thoreau also adopted many Hindu traditions, including a diet largely based on rice ("It's fitting that I should live on rice"), and he adored so much India's philosophy. "Ethnic pastime of Krishna" can be described as flute playing (assimulation of Krishna's favorite musical pastime) and yoga.

H.G.O. sent a letter in 1849 to his cousin H.G.O. Blake wrote about yoga and its meaning to him:

Thoreau read recent contributions in the field of biology, including Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Darwin, and Asa Gray (Charles Darwin's tenacious American ally). Thoreau's life, especially his work Cosmos, was heavily influenced by Humboldt.

Thoreau read Darwin's On the Origins of Species in 1859. Thoreau, unlike many natural historians at the time, including Louis Agassiz, who openly opposed Darwinism in favour of a static interpretation of nature, was immediately excited about the theory of evolution by natural selection and endorsed it, saying, "I was surprised by it."

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