The Oxford Companion to English Literature | 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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