Henry David Thoreau. Library of Congress LC-USZ61-361
Henry David Thoreau is famous for his writings on nature and philosophy, and he was a forerunner of present-day environmentalists. But he never made much money, and he died at the age of 45.
Thoreau was born in a farmhouse in Concord, Massachusetts, on July 12, 1817. John and Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau named their baby David Henry, but he was always called Henry. Cynthia was a strong, outspoken woman, while John was gentle and quiet. The Thoreaus had two older children, Helen and John, and after Henry a younger girl, Sophia. Young Henry’s earliest memories were from the village of Chelmsford, where they moved when he was a year old. He recalled, “The cow came into the entry after pumpkins. I cut my toe and was knocked over by a hen with chickens.”
Harvard University, where Thoreau earned his degree.
Library of Congress PAN US GEOG -Massachusetts no. 55
He also learned about God and that he would go to heaven when he died. He decided he didn’t want to go there because he couldn’t take his new sled. Another early memory was of lying in bed, looking out the window. He said he was “looking through the stars to see if I could see God behind them.”
Henry idolized his older brother, John. He was funny and charming and had lots of friends. Henry was quiet, serious, and a good student. He loved being outdoors, running barefoot through the grass, fishing in the creek, and hunting. He soon gave up hunting and fishing, however, because he decided he didn’t like killing.
He and John roamed the fields and woods, learning the names of the plants. They loved swimming in summer and ice-skating and sledding in winter.
When Thoreau was 16, he was ready to enter Harvard. His father’s pencil business was doing well, so the family could afford to send him. Helen used her teaching salary to help with his fees. Thoreau studied mathematics, classic literature, science, and rhetoric (English composition). He also studied languages, and by the time he left Harvard he could read Greek, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, and German.
He loved the library and spent hours there every day. He was also able to continue studying nature during his college years and often wandered along the banks of the Charles River. There he found the home of an ermine, a furry white mammal, in the hollow of an apple tree. He visited it nearly every day that winter.
In December 1835, he took a term off to teach in Canton, Massachusetts. He taught a class of 70 pupils for six weeks. There he met Reverend Orestes Brownson, who introduced him to Transcendentalism. This philosophy opposed the strict rituals and narrow-minded beliefs of many religions. Transcendentalists saw a direct connection between the universe and a person’s soul. They considered nature part of religion and thought people could discover the truth through awareness of the natural world around them.
While at Harvard, Thoreau discovered a book that changed his life. It was Nature, by Ralph Waldo Emerson. The book was a celebration of the wild, and it included concepts of Transcendentalism.
Thoreau was one of the high-ranking students of his class and was asked to speak at graduation in August 1837. In his speech, “The Commercial Spirit of Modern Times” he emphasized that a person should spend most of his time enjoying nature, not working.
Thoreau didn’t think he had received a great education at Harvard. “What I learned at college was chiefly, I think, to express myself,” he wrote later. He did learn to use the library, which served him the rest of his life. He also developed discipline, which helped him to carry on many of his own scientific studies of nature.
When he left college, Thoreau helped his dad make pencils for a while, then he got a job teaching in Concord. It was a good job, but he and the school committee had different ideas. He soon quit because he was told he had to use corporal punishment with the students, beating them or rapping their knuckles with a ruler.
About this time, he met Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was to have a great influence on his life. Thoreau was 20 and Emerson 34, but they quickly became close friends. Emerson encouraged Thoreau to keep a journal. On October 22, 1837, he made his first entry. He wrote that someone had asked him, “Are you keeping a journal?” So he wrote, “I make my first entry.”
Thoreau attended Transcendentalist discussions at Emerson’s house and met many interesting people. He agreed with most of their philosophy, but later his beliefs became more scientific. He did believe in the Transcendental view that being close to nature helped a person to discover spiritual truth.
In June 1838, Henry and John Thoreau started a private school in their home. Some of the boys boarded with them. Bronson Alcott’s daughters, Louisa May, Anna, and Beth were among their students. Students who couldn’t afford tuition were allowed to attend for free.
Ralph Waldo Emersoi
Library of Congress LC-DIG-pga-04133
Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women and Little Men. Library of Congress LC-USZ61-452
Be like Thoreau—makea journal in which you can record your observations as you watch wild animals around you. You can watch animals in your own backyard or in a nearby park or wildlife area. You probably will see squirrels, rabbits, and many kinds of birds. Don’t just write down the name of the animal. Watch it for a while and see how it actsand what itdoes.Writedown how itlooks and whatit does. Look atThoreau’s journal entries about animals for ideas. Your journal will be more modern, though. It will be done on a computer!
The school was quite different from others of its time. Henry wrote to a friend, “I could make education a pleasant thing both to the teacher and the scholar…. We should seek to be fellow-students with the pupil, and we should learn of, as well as with him, if we would be most helpful to him.”
There was no physical punishment. John made it clear to the students that they must want to learn. He talked to students who broke the rules. Students enjoyed going into the woods and fields with Henry and learning about the animals and American Indians.
Henry taught natural history, science, and languages while John instructed the children in math and English. Once a week they took the students on a walk, a sail, or a swim.
In April 1841, John suddenly became ill and the brothers were forced to close the school. Soon after that, Emerson invited Henry Thoreau to live at his house in exchange for working as his handyman, companion, and babysitter. Emerson traveled a lot and felt comfortable leaving his wife, Lidian, and the children with Thoreau. The children liked him. Waldo, called Wallie, was five, and Ellen was two. Another child, Edith, was born a few months later.
Thoreau spent some of his time at the Emer-sons’ home writing. He had published his first poem in 1840. He enjoyed life with the Emer-sons, but he was becoming restless. As he wrote in his journal on Christmas Eve, 1841, “I want to go soon and live away by the Pond, where I shall hear only the wind whispering among the reeds.”
A few days later, John Thoreau cut his finger; within a week he had contracted tetanus, which causes the body to become rigid. His jaw stiffened, and he suffered terrible spasms. Henry went home to help, but even a doctor from Boston couldn’t save John. He died in Henry’s arms on January 11, 1842.
John’s death was a horrible shock to Henry, and he never got over it. To make matters worse, little Wallie Emerson came down with a sore throat and fever on January 22 and died of scarlet fever six days later.
Emerson’s home.
Library of Congress LC-USZ62-132128
Thoreau had produced a lot of writing in the time he lived with the Emersons. Much of his work appeared in The Dial, a transcendentalist magazine. He also helped Emerson edit the magazine. In May he wrote an essay titled “Natural History of Massachusetts.” This was the beginning of his move toward becoming a naturalist, one who studies and interprets nature.
Dover Publications, Inc.
Thoreau was getting restless, and by this time he may have worn out his welcome at the Emer-sons’. Ralph Waldo Emerson got him a position tutoring the son of his brother William in Staten Island, New York. Emerson thought it would be easier for Thoreau to sell his writing to New York publishers if he were in the area.
But Thoreau hated life in the city. He wrote to Emerson that it was “a thousand times meaner than I could have imagined … the pigs in the street are the most respectable part of the population.” He only managed to sell two pieces of writing while he was there. He wrote to his mother, “Methinks I should be content to sit at the back door in Concord, under the poplar tree, henceforth forever.”
He did enjoy the ocean, though. He also met some people he liked, including Henry James, the philosopher, and Horace Gree-ley, the editor of the New York Tribune, who became a lifelong friend.
Thoreau arrived in New York in May and was home in Concord in time for Christmas. He lived with his parents and worked in the pencil business for a while. His writing career had stalled. His main publisher, Dial, had gone out of business.
In the fall of 1844, Thoreau helped his father build a new house for the family. This gave him some experience in building. He dug the basement and built the stone foundation walls. This was the first home the Thoreaus had ever owned, and they were very pleased with it.
Thoreau wanted to get away to a place where he could observe nature. Emerson provided the way. He bought 14 acres of land on the shore of Walden Pond and agreed to let Thoreau build a cabin in the woods near the pond.
Thoreau had wanted to live on Walden Pond since he was five years old. He was always trying to get closer to nature and simplify his life. At Walden he would be able to do both. He wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and to see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
Thoreau was happier and healthier during his time at Walden Pond than at any other time of his life. If weather permitted, he bathed in the pond in the morning. Sometimes he worked in his bean field or hoed corn. In the afternoons, he went for long walks. In cold weather, he spent most mornings reading and writing.
Site of Thoreau’s cabin.
Library of Congress LC-USZ62-39828
Until he finished the fireplace, Thoreau cooked outside. He baked hoecakes (oatmeal cakes) and bread. He made a kind of molasses from pumpkins or beets but preferred maple syrup as a sweetener. He decided he did not need salt. He only ate meat when he ate with friends or family. He did eat fish and lots of vegetables, as well as wild berries, grapes, chestnuts, and hickory nuts.
Thoreau’s cove at Walden Pond.
Library of Congress LC-D4-34878
Thoreau prepared his site beneath the pine trees and facing the pond. went down to the woods by Walden Pond, nearest to where I intended pines, still in their youth, for timber.”
He dug a cellar to store potatoes. He made the frame of the cabin bought a shack for $4.25. He tore the shanty apart carefully, saving all the nails to reuse.
Several of his friends helped with the house raising. Thoreau carried them to build the foundation for his fireplace.
He asserted his own independence by moving in on Independence building the chimney, fireplace, and stone hearth and plastering the walls. He spent $28.12% on the materials.
He described his house this way: “I have thus a tightly shingled posts, with a garret and a closet, a large window on each side, two trap doors, one door at the end, and a brick fireplace opposite.”
His household goods consisted of a bed, a three-legged table, a in the fireplace, a kettle, a skillet, a frying pan, a dipper, a wash bowl, jug for molasses, and a lamp. He also had books, pen, and paper.
Thoreau did a lot of writing at Walden. He finished a book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, which was about a trip he and John had taken. He also kept journals, as he knew he would want to write about his stay in the woods. He finished a complete draft of Walden, several lectures, and a third of his book The Maine Woods. He wrote a significant amount in two years, considering all the time he spent walking, observing nature, going into town, and entertaining company.
Thoreau thought a lot about the animals and the loss of their habitats. He wrote, “When I consider that the nobler animals have been exterminated here—the cougar, the panther, lynx, wolverine, wolf, bear, moose, deer, the beaver, the turkey, etc., etc.—I cannot but feel as if I lived in a tamed and as it were, emasculated [weakened] country.”
He also was upset by farmers killing hawks to protect their chickens. “I would rather never taste chickens’ meat nor hens’ eggs,” he wrote, “than never to see a hawk sailing through the upper air again. This sight is worth incomparably more than a chicken soup or a boiled egg.”
Common loon.
Dover Publications, Inc.
Thoreau took great interest in documenting everything he saw—signs of the changes of seasons, behavior of animals, and even the ice on the pond, which he measured and tested at intervals. He watched the colors change in the pond— green in the shallow places and blue in the deep. Many birds—chickadees, wood thrushes, brown thrashers, and martins—entertained him with their songs. He watched a fish hawk dive for fish and listened to the loons’ wild call. On summer evenings, he often heard an owl hooting.
Red-tailed hawk. ,
Dover Publications, Inc.
While at Walden, Thoreau became more interested in science. He found specimens of fish and other wildlife and shipped them to Louis Agassiz, a Swiss naturalist who had just come to America. Thoreau was able to provide specimens of two fish that Agassiz had never seen before.
Thoreau finally left the pond in late summer 1846, after spending a little more than two years there. He said he left the pond “for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spend any more time for that one.”
Barred owl.
Dover Publications, Inc.
One afternoon I amused myself by watching a barred owl sitting on one of the lower dead limbs of a white pine, close to the trunk, in broad daylight, I standing within a rod of him. He could hear me when I moved and crunched the snow with my feet, but could not plainly see me. When I made most noise he would stretch out his neck, and erect his neck feathers, and open his eyes wide; but their lids soon fell again, and he began to nod.
Fox.
Dover Publications, Inc.
I gained rapidly on the fox…. He took no step which was not beautiful … it was a sort of leopard canter, I should say, as if he were nowise impeded by the snow…. He ran as though there were not a bone in his back, occasionally dropping his muzzle to the snow … then tossing his head aloft when satisfied of his course. When he came to a declivity [a steep downward slope], he put his forefeet together and slid down it like cat. He trod so softly that you could not have heard it from any nearness.
Hare.
Dover Publications, Inc.
One evening one [hare] sat by my door two paces from me, at first trembling with fear, yet unwilling to move; a poor wee thing, lean and bony, with ragged ears, a sharp nose, scant tail and slender paws. I took a step and lo, away it scud [ran] with an elastic spring over the snow crust, straightening its body and its limbs into graceful length, and soon put the forest between me and itself.
Louis Agassiz.
Library of Congress LC-DIG-ppmsca-08365
He wrote, “I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
Thoreau moved back in with the Emersons. Emerson went on a long trip to England and Tho-reau was there to help Lidian with the children, Ellen, Edith, and little Eddy, who was born after Wallie had died.
Goshawk.
Dover Publications, Inc.
During this time Thoreau sold some essays, and in 1848, he paid to have his first book published: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. It got some good reviews but only sold 219 of the 1,000 copies he had had printed.
Although he no longer lived at Walden, he still spent much time enjoying nature. He wrote, “I cannot feel well in health and spirit without at least four hours a day sauntering through the woods and fields of Concord township.”
Agassiz came to Concord and studied nature with Thoreau. A friend of Thoreau’s shot a goshawk, and he sent the body to Agassiz. After examining it, Agassiz determined that John James Audubon had been mistaken when he identified the goshawk as being part of the same family as the European falcon.
Thoreau often found animals to observe by following their tracks. Here’s how you can make a plaster cast of an animal track that you find in the mud.
Thoreau enjoyed traveling and made several trips to the Maine woods and one to Cape Cod, where he was fascinated by the desolate expanse of sand and sea.
Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience” was published in 1849. He believed that if a law was unjust, citizens should refuse to obey it. He had once been jailed for refusing to pay his poll tax. His reason was that he didn’t want his money to support either slavery or the Mexican War. Thoreau also worked against slavery, writing and delivering several lectures on the subject. His family once helped a runaway slave escape to Canada.
In March 1854, Thoreau found a publisher for Walden. He had self-published his first book, which means he paid all the expenses. This time the publisher, Ticknor and Fields, paid to publish the book. The first printed copy arrived on August 2. An announcement appeared in the New York Tribune and the book received several favorable reviews. However, it was not a big success, selling only about 2,000 copies in Thoreau’s lifetime. He received a royalty check for $51.60.
In the spring of 1855, Thoreau became very ill. He had a bad cough and was so weak he could barely stand. He wasn’t really well again until December. This was probably the beginning of his battle with tuberculosis, which plagued many members of his family.
Henry’s father died in 1859. Now Henry was in charge of the family business and spent many hours filling orders for pencils and doing the paperwork his father had always done. He continued to lecture around the area.
Thoreau became more and more interested in science. He joined the Boston Society of Natural History and gave many lectures on nature. Thoreau was fascinated by forests and how they grow, including the way seeds are dispersed, or spread. He believed that seed-eating squirrels and birds were helpful to the forest, rather than destructive, as they helped disperse seeds. He began determining the ages of trees by counting the rings in the cross-sections of the trunks of felled trees. He discovered a cedar tree that had been alive before the Europeans settled New England in the early 1600s.
On December 3, 1860, Thoreau spent a cold wet day counting the rings of a tree. He became ill with bronchitis, a sickness of the lungs. He was sick all winter and was too weak to even write in his journal. Although he was strongly against slavery, he was too ill to even take much interest in the Civil War, which was just beginning.
His last trip, in the spring of 1861, was to Minnesota to study grassland plants and see how the American Indians lived. Seventeen-year-old Horace Mann Jr. went with him. He was the son of the great educator Horace Mann. When Thoreau returned home, his health was worse than ever. He tried to get back to making journal entries and sold some articles that fall.
John Burroughs.
Dover Publications, Inc.
The naturalist John Burroughs wrote about Thoreau in his first book, saying: “Time will enhance rather than lessen the value of his contributions…. Thoreau occupies a niche by himself, but Thoreau was not a great personality; far from it; yet his writings have a strong characteristic flavor … he has reference, also, to the highest truths…. Thoreau was, probably, the wildest civilized man this country has produced. Add to the shyness of the hermit and woodsman the wildness of the poet.”
Drawing of Mohandas Gandhi by Pogany.
Library of Congress LC-B2-5553-18
Mohandas Gandhi, known for his nonviolent resistance in India, was deeply impressed when he read “Civil Disobedience.” He said, “The essay seemed to me so convincing and truthful that I felt the need of knowing more of Thoreau.”
Another nonviolent leader, Martin Luther King Jr., gave Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” credit for inspiring his civil rights campaigns in the south. His work was aimed at achieving equal treatment for African Americans.
By the beginning of 1862, it had become clear that Henry Thoreau was dying. He wrote in March, “If I were to live, I should have much to report on Natural History generally,” but he added, “I suppose that I have not many months to live.”
He had his bed brought downstairs so he could visit with family and friends, and his mother and Sophia took care of him. He was so weak the last month that he could barely whisper, but he was aware of what was going on. He died on the morning of May 6, 1862, with his mother, Sophia, and his Aunt Maria beside him.
Thoreau’s writings have influenced many since his death. His books and articles are still read and enjoyed by many people today.
