When Henry David Thoreau died in 1862, he was relatively unknown as an author and frequently disparaged by critics who read his work. As he rose to prominence in the later nineteenth century, critics and scholars struggled to disentangle him from this earlier appraisal and evaluate him in his own right. Under a more appreciative critical eye, he became many things to many people, but nineteenth-century critics failed to achieve a common understanding of his message or meaning. And so the quest for the “real” Thoreau continued, as scholar after scholar plunged into his considerable corpus and emerged with what each thought to be a definitive understanding of the man and his work. The search itself is eminently useful—indeed, the very definition of scholarship—but it must seem apparent by now that his quintessence will continue to elude us.
This book attempts a different quest. By focusing not on Thoreau but on the numerous attempts at finding him over the ages, it asks how this author, so obscure in 1862, could be appraised a century later as one of America’s most widely recognized writers. Few authors have enjoyed such a spectacular reversal of fortunes at the hands of critics and biographers, and understanding how this happened is a fascinating story in itself. But this is ancillary to another perhaps more important inquiry: What might we learn by studying these successive literary interpretations in the context of their times? To put this question another way, how did Americans in different ages react to Thoreau, and what insights might we gain about American culture by tracing the history of this commentary?
Thoreau was unique among American authors in that the bulk of his work was published after his death. His journals, for instance, did not appear in complete form until 1906, with a final “lost” volume surfacing in 1956, and even as late as 1993 typesetters were preparing yet another unpublished manuscript for print. Each new issue from this horde of manuscript materials was greeted by another round of critical appraisal. In this and other ways, each generation of scholars, journalists, nature writers, and biographers was induced to take up Thoreau’s ideas and interpret them for their own readers. These interpretations shifted repeatedly over the generations, and the degree to which they varied from age to age tells us the first thing we need to know about Thoreau’s writing: as a symbolic figure in American literature, he was remarkably adaptable, given his unique personality, writing style, and philosophic temperament. His malleability was partly self-willed. As a transcendentalist, he aimed at abstraction and used coy metaphors to shake readers free of superficial thinking. His often outrageous paradoxes functioned as “verbal shock-treatment,” in the words of Joseph J. Moldenhauer, bolting readers out of their conventional habits. “He turned the world upside down,” Saul Padover explained, in order to offer readers an entirely new perspective.1 More than this, he seemed to take personal pleasure in self-contradiction, indulging an impish sense of humor that literary critics too often overlook in trying to make sense of him. Thoreau, in short, could support any number of wildly different interpretations, and each generation, according to its own cultural needs, aspirations, and anxieties, took advantage of this. He became a symbol for the times—repeatedly—from the Industrial Revolution on into the environmental era.
The methods I use to assess this shifting literary reputation are essentially historiographical, following an approach surprisingly rare in Thoreau scholarship, given his prominence in American history. Almost all we know about him comes from literary biographers, literary scholars, and nature essayists. Roderick Nash, an intellectual historian, placed him at the center of his classic Wilderness and the American Mind, and environmental historian Donald Worster, in his Nature’s Economy, analyzed his contribution to the science of ecology. But both authors treated him essentially as a benchmark in the history of ideas rather than as a window into the culture of his times. This was also true of Paul Brooks’s Speaking for Nature: How Literary Naturalists from Henry Thoreau to Rachel Carson Have Shaped America and Hans Huth’s Nature and the American: Three Centuries of Changing Attitudes. Like Nash and Worster, Brooks and Huth highlight Thoreau’s contribution to the idea of nature, but neither explains how his thoughts resonated through society in his time or ours.
Thoreau’s popularity, of course, depended a good deal on the popularity of nature as a literary motif. It is hard to overstate the importance of this point. As William Bradford stood on the deck of the Mayflower on that bleak December day, looking out across a hideous and desolate wilderness, his thoughts by necessity turned to the meaning of nature in the new land, and from that moment on, nature has been a defining theme in American culture. The idea itself has changed many times over since 1620, and the way to understand this in historical context, I argue, is not by scrutinizing the great literary minds in each age but by considering the scholars, critics, biographers, journalists, writers, and essayists who interpreted these seminal writings for their own readers. This vast and varied stratum of middling writers played a far more important role in defining American culture than most scholars acknowledge. It is in this sense—as a focus of this ongoing literary conversation—that Thoreau becomes a window into American culture.
Historians now recognize that the shape of nature varied not only from age to age but also according to the point of view of specific groups, classes, races, and genders in each of these ages. A tighter focus on a specific time and place would bring these voices to light, but a broad survey such as this blurs these distinctions. If this approach fails to represent all voices in a single age, it does represent nicely the pageant of change over time. Separately or together, these neglected writers—upper class or lower, man or woman, highbrow or middlebrow—reveal in their struggle to find Thoreau the day-to-day mechanics of defining nature for America.
The first chapter of this book offers a brief biography, highlighting the personal and literary characteristics that would become a focus of Thoreau commentary in the decades after his death. Chapter 2 follows his reputation from 1862 through the 1890s, reviewing a number of dramatic changes in the idea of nature and a parallel shift in Thoreau’s literary fortunes. The third chapter assesses his reputation in the Progressive Era, a period marked by rising popular interest in nature study, outdoor recreation, and conservation. The fourth chapter focuses on Thoreau in the decades between 1920 and 1960, when his reputation as a nature writer was eclipsed by his timeliness as a social critic. Chapter 5 describes the struggle to define Thoreau in a confusing and conflicted world of civil protest and environmental concern, and the final chapter caps his odyssey from obscurity to renown by tracing his rise as an environmental icon.
The commentary described in these chapters is pieced together from sources that range from scholarly tome to newspaper filler. I have distinguished between these various forms of assessment where the differences are suggestive, but frequently the voices blend together as a single message. When this is the case, I treat them more or less as the unified pronouncement of an age, keeping in mind, however, that scholars and journalists spoke to different audiences. In order to provide visual relief from the attribution of these multiple sources, I generally combine notes at the end of each paragraph. Where authors are not identified in text, I link them to specific citations parenthetically in the notes.
Much of this information comes from newspapers, and although I have not so indicated in each citation—again to avoid verbal clutter—the newspaper quotes are accessible in one of three databases: America’s Historical Newspapers, Making of America, and New York Times Historical. The attributions will be apparent to those familiar with these databases. A second key source of information is the magnificent collection of Thoreauviana left to the Thoreau Society by Walter Harding, the nation’s leading authority on Thoreau. I attribute this source specifically in each citation. The Harding Collection is now housed at the Thoreau Institute in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and for help in accessing this archive I owe a great deal to Jeffrey S. Cramer, a prolific Thoreau scholar who curates the institute’s collections. I am also deeply indebted to the many bibliographers, past and present, who brought to my attention even the tiniest bit of Thoreau ephemera. I also benefited from the materials collected by Mary Sherwood and housed as the Thoreau Fellowship Records in the Special Collections Department at the University of Maine’s Raymond H. Fogler Library. I owe a debt of thanks to the library’s Mel Johnson, who launched me on my quest to find Thoreau in the library’s considerable collection of databases. Audiences at several formal and informal presentations commented on my work in progress, and my colleague Mark J. McLaughlin provided valuable feedback on the epilogue.
And last but certainly not least, I would like to thank Pat and Kieran, who with patience and good humor put up with several years of Thoreau babble at the dinner table. May they take comfort in knowing that their ordeal is nearly over.
Richard W. Judd
November 2017