Henry David Thoreau
American Writer, Philosopher
1817-1862
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
-Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau was a writer and poet, born in Concord, Massachusetts. While attending Harvard College he began his lifelong habit of keeping journals. Later he taught briefly in Concord but resigned to protest the disciplinary whipping of students.
He helped in his father's pencil factory, and then opened a private school in Concord (1838) based on Transcendentalism, the ideas taught by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Bronson Alcott.
A few years later he built a small cabin on Emerson's land alongside Walden Pond where he lived for several years. There, he spent most of his time observing nature and meditating. He supported himself with odd jobs around the area, such as gardening and carpentry. The journal he kept at Walden became the source of his most famous book, Walden, Or Life in the Woods (1854), in which he set forth his ideas on how people should be tuned in to their own nature as well as to nature itself.
After leaving Walden, he occasionally worked at the pencil factory and did some surveying work while he made brief trips to such places as Cape Cod, Maine, and (in 1861) as far as Minnesota. By the 1850s he had become greatly concerned over slavery, and wrote passionately against it.
When he was alive, he was not famous, but today people think of him as one of the great American thinkers. Henry David Thoreau died May 6th 1862, after suffering of a prolonged case of tuberculosis, a disease which had plagued him throughout most of his adult life.