Thoreau, Henry David
Thoreau, Henry David ( 1817 – 62 ),American author, born in Concord, Massachusetts, and educated at Harvard. He became a follower and friend of Emerson , and was, in his own words, ‘a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a natural philosopher to boot’. He supported himself by a variety of occupations, as lead pencil-maker (his father's trade), as schoolteacher, tutor, and surveyor; a few of his poems were published in the Dial , but he made no money from literature, and published only two books in his lifetime. The first, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack River ( 1849 ), described a journey undertaken in 1839 with his brother; the second, Walden, or Life in the Woods ( 1854 ), attracted little attention, but has since been recognized as a literary masterpiece and as one of the seminal books of the century. It describes his two-year experiment in self-sufficiency ( 1845 – 7 ) when he built...
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