Henry David Thoreau

Born David Henry Thoreau on July 12, 1817, in Concord, Massachusetts, a small town twenty miles west of Boston that he would leave only reluctantly and never for long. He was the third of four children born to John Thoreau, who ran a modest pencil factory, and Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau, who took in boarders to supplement the family's income. He reversed the order of his given names while at Harvard, from which he graduated in 1837, returning to Concord to teach school. With his brother John he opened a progressive grammar school in 1838, but it closed in 1841 after John fell ill. John's death from tetanus in January 1842, he had cut his finger while stropping a razor, devastated Thoreau and deepened the brooding intensity that marked his character. He became a protégé and sometime handyman of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who lived nearby and recognized his genius early. On July 4, 1845, Thoreau moved into a small cabin he had built himself on the shore of Walden Pond, on land owned by Emerson, and lived there for two years, two months, and two days. The experiment produced Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854), a book of such compressed, aphoristic brilliance that it has never gone out of print. During his time at the pond he spent a night in jail for refusing to pay his poll tax in protest of the Mexican-American War and slavery; the essay that grew from the experience, "Civil Disobedience" (1849), would later influence Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. He was also a meticulous naturalist whose journals, filling nearly two million words, are among the great works of American observation. Tuberculosis, which had killed his brother and his grandfather, claimed him on May 6, 1862, at forty-four. His last audible words were "moose" and "Indian."