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Henry David Thoreau Biography

Henry David Thoreau is best known to most Americans as a man who divorced himself from society and lived in the woods, specifically the woods of Concord, Massachusetts, near Walden Pond, which he made famous with a small book of essays.

In the book, Walden or Life in the Woods, Thoreau offers his views on the duties and the rights of free men, the relationship of man to nature, the significance of solitude, the ultimate purpose of each man's existence, and numerous other beliefs he holds.

Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, on July 12, 1817. During his lifetime, the United States would struggle to deal with its territorial expansion, mechanization and labor, foreign and domestic wars, and the issue of slavery. Thoreau himself was fervently against slavery; he also chose to be incarcerated, rather than pay taxes that would support the United States' war with Mexico. Thoreau spent only one night in jail, and he explains some of his reasoning in his 1849 essay, Civil Disobedience, which deals with defiance against unjust laws and acts by governments. His views on effective resistance to unfair government practices are contained in the essay, which remains a bible of nonviolent resistance movements. Thoreau's theories influenced the Indian civil rights leader, Mohandas Gandhi, South African former President, Nelson Mandela, as well as the African-American head of the Civil Rights Movement, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Thoreau attended Harvard from 1833 to 1837. Upon graduating, he taught school for a time, but soon resigned his position. A bit later, Thoreau met Ralph Waldo Emerson, the founder of the Transcendentalist Movement, and they became close friends. Emerson was a patron of Thoreau's, encouraging him to write and helping him publish; Thoreau even became a tutor to Emerson's children.

During a period of disagreement with Emerson, however, Thoreau set off on his adventure in the simplification of his life, to, as the famous lines put it, “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.” His experiment of living alone in a cabin in the woods lasted two years and two months. In the middle of his sojourn, he went through the experience that led him to write Civil Disobedience. Anyone reading the book today might call its author an early proponent of libertarian philosophy, since it begins, “I heartily accept the motto—‘That government is best which governs least’.”

On the day Thoreau died, May 6, 1862, the United States was in the middle of the Civil War, fighting over what freedom meant and who should be free. Thoreau's writings became part of the canon of American literature which deals with the subject, and the number of minds he has influenced about personal and political duty is beyond count.