On July 12, 1917, one hundred years to the day after Henry David Thoreau’s birth in Concord, Massachusetts, a newspaper editor in Fort Worth reported with amazement that “so far as we know, no public celebration of Thoreau’s centennial of any consequence is being held in America.” That same day the Boston Journal noted that the town of Concord, home to “one of the . . . most celebrated writers that New England has ever produced,” seemed to have “forgotten that he ever lived.” Although a few hundred admirers paid homage at the author’s grave site, the town’s leaders, like the rest of America, let the occasion pass without official observance. The Fort Worth editor speculated that recent entry into the European war had “diverted our thought from such things,” and Edward Emerson, son of the Sage of Concord, explained that his committee postponed the Concord commemoration until October, when townspeople had returned from their summer excursions. Unconvinced, the Boston reporter concluded the story with a familiar biblical irony: “A prophet is not without honor save in his own country.”1
The ambiguity that surrounded the 1917 centennial was typical of Thoreau’s status as an American writer. Contrary to what we might expect, he was not widely received as an author in his lifetime, and he remained virtually unknown throughout most of the nineteenth century. While he lived, his reputation hinged on the spectacularly unsuccessful A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, the somewhat more widely read Walden, a series of unevenly reviewed lyceum lectures, and a few articles appearing in obscure journals. “Given this history of publication,” literary critic Townsend Scudder wrote, “and considering the peculiar man himself, there was bound to be a confusion of appraising voices—a babble taking years to blend into anything which approximates a chorus.”2
Some attribute this obscurity to an extraordinarily harsh retrospective written two years after his death by James Russell Lowell, considered at that time America’s most renowned literary critic. Thoreau’s reputation languished after this attack, but in the 1880s his surviving friends burnished his memory by publishing excerpts from his manuscripts and a series of adulatory biographies. Distressed by Lowell’s commentary, they ignored Thoreau’s complex philosophy of life and emphasized his seemingly simple descriptions of nature, precisely at a time when Americans were becoming enthusiastic converts to nature study and outdoor recreation. The nature study movement quickened Thoreau’s entry into the American canon. Wendell Glick, who published an anthology of literary criticism in 1969, noted that by the time his reputation had recovered from Lowell’s attacks, the latter was receding “into the dusty recesses now occupied by his Brahmin contemporaries.” Unimpressed by the poetic justice in Glick’s account, Richard Rutland argued that “if Thoreau’s story needs a villain, let it be the nation itself that lacked the requisite self-knowledge to understand what literature it needed and to acknowledge what literature it got.” But all this reasoning raises an opposite question: What accounts for his near-universal recognition as an American writer in the century that followed? As Edward O. Wilson put it, how did an “amateur naturalist perched in a toy house on the edge of a ravaged woodlot became the founding saint of the conservation movement”?3 The dynamics of Thoreau’s reputation have never been satisfactorily explained.
Thoreau’s literary odyssey is one of the least known but most intriguing stories in the history of American literature. As Lawrence Buell points out, Thoreau was one of the first authors to be added to the American literary pantheon, and for this reason the history of his reputation “makes an unusually interesting window onto American literary history.” He is also one of the few American writers to achieve fame as a folk hero—a “patron saint of American environmental writing,” as Buell puts it. He stands, then, as iconic not only in American literature but in popular culture as well. Surely, the arc of his reputation begs an explanation.4
The matter becomes somewhat clear if we consider his work in its historical context. Walden challenged all Americans to march to the beat of a different drum, but at the time of its publication in 1854 the gigantic mills at Waltham and Lowell were demonstrating the power and productivity of regimented effort, and as Thoreau lay on his deathbed in Concord in spring 1862, the spectacle of troops moving in unison across the battlefields of Virginia testified to the importance of united purpose. But if the Civil War generation rejected individualism, turn-of-the-century Americans embraced it, seeking a firmer sense of self in communion with nature. In like manner, each successive generation redefined Thoreau in order to find something meaningful in his life and works. Summarizing a century-long search for the true Thoreau, biographer Walter Harding mused that he had been, at one time or another, America’s greatest satirist, its greatest conservationist, its greatest prose stylist, its greatest theorist of civil disobedience, and its greatest philosopher. And for each superlative conferred, there was an equally exaggerated condemnation waiting in the wings. Literary critic V. F. Calverton observed that Thoreau’s writing indeed possessed “powerful magic, or there would not be such a need to . . . canonize the shade, or weight it down in the earth under a cairn of rocks.”5
Mark Sullivan, who surveyed graphic representations of Thoreau over the century after his death, found it astonishing “to see the number of ways in which . . . his facial features have been used to convey different messages, or to fit different purposes.” Each image, as Sullivan pointed out, reflected a Thoreau for the times. This malleability stems in part from Thoreau’s enigmatic writing style. When Walden was first published, a reviewer expressed his frustration at finding a meaning in the book: “The author has Carlyle’s hatred of shams and Carlyle’s way of showing it; he has Sir Thomas Browne’s love of pregnant paradox and stupendous joke, and utters his paradoxes and his jokes with a mysterious phlegm quite akin to that of the Medical Knight who ‘existed only at the periphery of his being.’” All this and more he mixed together “without regard to abstract consistency.”6 Thoreau’s illusiveness frustrated critics like this, but it explains, more perhaps than his stylistic brilliance, his popular status today.
This legacy of conflicting interpretation complicated the quest for the true Thoreau. Shortly before the turn of the twentieth century, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who knew him well, reflected on his friend’s literary persona. We have to look at literary figures like Thoreau, he wrote, “not merely as they now seem, but as they appeared in their day, and we must calculate their parallax.” Vexed by the same enigma, Sandra Harbert Petrulionis introduced a volume of Thoreau criticism in 2012 with a query: “How can we disentangle Henry Thoreau from the myriad causes and ideas now synonymous with his name?” The quest for the true Thoreau is indeed fraught with uncertainty; perhaps, after all, there is no solid bedrock beneath the writer and the written. Perhaps, rather than winnow away the false Thoreaus, we should consider the full range of past interpretations, no matter how broad the spectrum. If we cannot disentangle the true from the transient, perhaps we can learn something from the very nature of this entanglement: How did Americans in successive ages respond to his writing, and what, in turn, do these responses tell us about American culture over this long century of criticism?7
“Thoreau has taught countless Americans to see nature,” historian R. D. Richardson wrote in 1986, and indeed his writing tells us a great deal about this core cultural value. As New York Times writer R. L. Duffus pointed out in 1931, nations define themselves mainly through their literature; people write, read, and react to the writing of others, and in the process they forge a national culture. In America that culture is inseparably linked to the idea of nature. To the Puritan, nature was a howling wilderness; to the romantic, a symbol of transcendent truth; and to the modern, a fragile system of ecological interactions. Lewis Mumford saw this complicated bundle of ideas as one of the “chief creations of the civilized man.” In technologically simple societies, the idea of nature is “scarcely visible,” he pointed out, but as society learns to manipulate its environment, it elaborates, and as these manipulations increase in scale, the idea of nature takes on additional layers of meaning.8 Ironically, the more society is separated from nature by its technology, the more completely its members need to define it. As both Duffus and Mumford suggest, the idea of nature is far from static; each age defines it on its own terms.
But if we set aside Richardson’s vision of Thoreau as the voice of nature in America, a broader prospect comes to light: an ongoing critical conversation about his philosophy of nature sustained for more than a century by scholars, literary critics, essayists, journalists, and biographers who took up Thoreau’s ideas and translated them into the idiom of their own times. Defining nature was not an act of individual genius but rather a collective cultural project. Great literary figures do, of course, participate in the construction and reconstruction of nature, but only as part of a larger process. By their very genius they are extraordinary; they rise above historical circumstance and convey a transcendent interpretation of nature. But as Thoreau’s reputation demonstrates, each age reacts on its own terms to these transcendent interpretations, and thus the meaning of nature in each age—its personal, recreational, spiritual, and therapeutic value—is better represented by its own critics and writers than by the seminal authors themselves. Collectively, this commentary was more widely read than was Thoreau himself, and it was composed by men and women who were close observers of their own times—who appreciated how their readers were likely to react to Thoreau’s message. Using Thoreau as inspiration, these midlevel intellectuals interpreted the organic world beyond their doorstep, and, accordingly, they become the focus of our story. In following them as they create this American icon, we get to the very essence of nature as an evolving cultural construct.
David Henry Thoreau, known later in life as Henry, was born in Concord on July 12, 1817, third of four children. His grandfather had emigrated from the Isle of Jersey, and when Henry was born his father was maintaining a small farm in Concord that belonged to his wife’s mother. Casting his lot as a merchant, John Thoreau moved the family from Concord to Boston, Chelmsford, and back to Concord. Perhaps too withdrawn for this trade, he remained poor—a “small, deaf, and unobtrusive man.” Thoreau’s mother, Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau, was by most accounts assertive, outgoing, and talkative; together they were a study in contrasts. Thoreau spent almost all his life living at home, and like everything else about him, this family background has been folded into the ongoing discussion of his literary reputation. Early biographers emphasized his Jersey privateer heritage on one side and his Scots and Puritan lineage on the other. Later critics singled out the contrast between his parents and highlighted the supposed tensions in these family circumstances. Neither father nor mother offered an appropriate model, they surmised, and Thoreau’s writing reflected this psychic conflict. In fact, family life seems to have been happier than these psychobiographers make it out to be, but these circumstances have been a focus of critical commentary from the first posthumous assessments on.9
A methodical tinkerer, John Thoreau eventually went into pencil making with his brother-in-law, and the business prospered modestly. Again, biographical accounts vary. In some, the family’s continuing economic uncertainty explains Thoreau’s withdrawn personality; in others, the parents maintained the cultural standards of their lineage. To make ends meet, the Thoreaus took in boarders and crowded the household with older relatives. Of the latter, most were, by all accounts, prudish and provincial. This stultifying atmosphere helps explain not only the iconoclasm that marked so much of Thoreau’s writing but also the Puritan-like adherence to principle that punctuated his social philosophy.10
In 1833 Thoreau entered Harvard College. Although he later claimed these Harvard years were wasted, the school gave him the solid grounding in classics, modern literature, philosophy, and natural history that made his later writing so distinctive. He put his academic credentials to use briefly in 1838 when he and his older brother, John, opened a private academy in Concord. The endeavor was successful, but when John’s health declined in 1841 they closed the school and Henry returned to the pencil shop and helped the family perfect a formula for using graphite in the electrotyping process.11 Henry was close to his brother, John, and it was in the context of brotherly relations that his first and only well-documented affair of heart unfolded. Seventeen-year-old Ellen Sewall arrived in Concord for a two-week visit in 1839, and since the two families were long acquainted, the five children—Sophia, Helen, Henry, John, and Ellen—spent time together. At age twenty-two, Henry fell in love. He seems to have stepped aside to allow John to court Ellen, and John asked her to marry him. She accepted, but her father opposed the union. Henry then proposed and met a similar fate, and thus the romance ended.12
Again the arbiters of his literary reputation read much into a seemingly simple episode. Townsend Scudder speculated that marriage would have undermined Thoreau’s individualism, a foundational principle in his writing, and thus Ellen “played her unconscious part” in the making of an American literary icon. Others exaggerate or dismiss the episode in order to bolster their own theories on Thoreau’s sexual bearing or to suggest that he subsequently sublimated his romantic inclinations in his worship of nature. Perhaps so, but his biographer Walter Harding cautions against such inferences. “It must not be forgotten that he was raised in an atmosphere of prudish bachelorhood and spinsterhood. Neither his brother nor his sisters ever married—nor Aunt Jane, nor Aunt Maria, nor Aunt Louisa, nor Aunt Sally, nor Aunt Betsey, nor Uncle Charles—and all of these were at one time or another members of the Thoreau household.” For whatever reason, it does seem that after the episode he resigned himself to life as a bachelor.13
The setting for Thoreau’s brief romance was a town of some two thousand inhabitants strung out along several roads converging on a tree-shaded central square. Concord’s rivers were too listless to inspire the visions that transformed nearby Waltham and Lowell into industrial cities, and among its neighbors it was known as Sleepy Hollow, an image that helped form Thoreau’s own impression of the good society. Its economy had been built around grain and livestock production, but by Thoreau’s time this traditional way of life was beginning to break down. The village stood at the center of a manufacturing belt stretching from the Connecticut River on the west to the Charles and Merrimack on the east, and as the regional industrial workforce grew, the market for locally produced agricultural products expanded. In 1844 Concord gained a rail connection to Boston, and this opened opportunities for producing perishables like butter, eggs, milk, fruits, and vegetables—a market that impelled Thoreau’s neighbors into the world of abstract prices, impersonal transactions, and distant financial arrangements.14 Like other Concord transcendentalists, Thoreau was unsettled by the new conditions of production. The countryside was becoming “denaturalized,” he thought, suffering from a growing separation between poetry and life. As his confidence in society dissolved, his faith in nature grew.15
Despite these changes, Thoreau was firmly rooted in Concord. The town’s thin, sandy soils discouraged agricultural expansion, and thus it remained more forested than most in the Boston area, and for this and other reasons it offered an ideal setting for the unique mix of philosophical reflection and scientific observation that made up so much of his writing. Concord bent to the winds of market capitalism sufficiently to give purchase to his critique of commercialism, yet at the margins it preserved the slower pace that inspired his lofty thinking. From this experience he extracted an amazing array of meanings, giving the whole town an allegorical cast unique among literary settings.16
Thoreau’s other grounding in Concord came in sharing his thoughts with some of the most brilliant minds in America. Standing head and shoulders above Concord’s literati was Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose magnetic personality and stimulating insights drew others like him to town. Emerson was America’s foremost intellectual in the antebellum decades, founder of the transcendental movement and famous for lofty musings and lectures in which he conveyed his thoughts with a rhythm and diction that electrified listeners, even if they only vaguely understood him. He withdrew from the ministry in 1832 to write and lecture and settled in Concord in 1834, staying for a time with his grandparents at Old Manse. Concord, he found, distanced him from the Cambridge theologians who censured his break with orthodoxy. Its people, if no more tolerant, were at least less sensitive to the nuances of his religious views. There, surrounded by friends and sympathetic thinkers, he sailed boldly into the uncharted waters of post-Puritan spirituality.17
Emerson drew other philosophers and writers to Concord, and each arrival increased the gravitational pull of the town’s intellectual culture. “The world Thoreau entered when Emerson opened the doors of his house could be matched in few other times or places,” Townsend Scudder observed. Along with Emerson, Thoreau became friends with Bronson Alcott, Ellery Channing, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson and conversed with Margaret Fuller, George William Curtis, George Ripley, Elizabeth Peabody, John Sullivan Dwight, Jones Very, Orestes Brownson, and James Freeman Clarke, all of them familiar faces in Concord. He was also in touch with a number of women who, if not literary figures in their own right, were powerful contributors to the town’s intellectual climate: Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, Ellen Fuller, Elizabeth Hoar, the wife and daughters of Edmund Hosmer, Emerson’s aunt Mary Moody Emerson, and indeed many of those in Thoreau’s own extended family.18 Coming to maturity in this vibrant intellectual climate, he set his sights on becoming a writer.
Each of these transcendentalists was unique, but in some ways, Concord philosophizing was a collective project, an intense and perpetual round of discussion that circulated each idea across the entire community. Bronson Alcott described a day typical among these friends: “Pass the forenoon with Thoreau. We walk by ‘The Cottage’ and discourse reclining on the hillside near the Indian meadows by the riverside. Afternoon with Emerson. We walk to Walden and bathe. Emerson reads me the introductory paper to his book Representative Men, now nearly ready for the press, and we discuss Plato, Goethe, Swedenborg, and some others of his Representatives of the race.” Thoreau’s closest companions were Alcott and Ellery Channing, who like Thoreau took their inspiration from nature. With these two he could engage in open and spontaneous conversation, but even here Thoreau could be frustrating. Alcott struggled to understand his approach: “His sagacity,” he wrote, was “like a bee and beaver, the dog and the deer . . . the peer of the backwoodsman and Indian.” Their kinship rested less on a mutual understanding than on an intense intellectual curiosity and disregard for social convention. “It may be that there are men now as quaint and original as were easily accessible in those days,” Thomas Wentworth Higginson recalled in 1898, “but if so, I wish some one would favor me with a letter of introduction.”19
To a young man of retiring personality, these often intense conversations were emotionally exhausting, and he read into them far more than others might. Because he asked so much of these friendships, he was frequently disappointed. “How happens it that I find myself making such an enormous demand on men and [am] so constantly disappointed? Are my friends aware how disappointed I am? Is it all my fault? Have I no heart?” Biographer Mary Elkins Moller identified numerous journal entries that reveal a visceral desire for solitude and no small hint of misanthropy, but she notes that these expressions were balanced by others indicating a “strong sense of belonging to a community.” Desperate for friendship, and desperate to avoid it, he learned from these Concord transcendentalists, but he also learned from their failings.20
In 1841, when the brothers’ Concord Academy closed, Emerson, who traveled frequently on lecture tours, invited Thoreau to move into his household as a gardener and handyman. Thoreau spent two years with the Emerson family and while there began publishing poems in the Dial, a short-lived periodical that served as an outlet for transcendentalist thought. Margaret Fuller, who edited the journal, found his writing rich in ideas but short on technical skill—“so choked with mystical symbolism, as to make painful reading.” When Emerson became editor, he published more of Thoreau’s work but like Fuller found it troublesome. “We must mend him if we can,” he wrote to Fuller in 1840.21 Emerson’s friendship was crucial to Thoreau’s literary development, but the weight of the older man’s imposing personality bore down on the young disciple. A Concord companion noted that Thoreau so imitated Emerson in tone and gesture that it was “annoying to listen to him,” and another remembered that in the company of both, it was difficult to discern who was actually speaking. Aware of Thoreau’s close relationship to Emerson, critics debated for decades the authenticity of his style and philosophy.22
Thoreau himself grew troubled by his lack of independence, and on Emerson’s advice in 1843 he moved to Staten Island, where he spent ten months tutoring the son of Emerson’s brother and looking for an outlet for his essays. Thoroughly homesick, he returned to Concord in early 1844, age twenty-seven and still casting about for a career. Living at home, he pursued an assortment of income-producing jobs and spent his afternoons sauntering, a task he approached with all the seriousness of a chosen profession. He simplified his needs to match this disparate income and spent most of his time pursuing his calling as Concord’s “self-appointed inspector of snow-storms and rain-storms.”23
The philosophy that united Thoreau and the other Concord intellectuals was transcendentalism, a native offshoot of the European romantic movement. Romanticism challenged the rationalist interpretation of reality inspired by the scientific revolution and the materialistic ethic of the dawning industrial age. It preached simple pastoral virtues in an era of complex industrial organization and promised spiritual satisfaction in lieu of material reward. In this struggle of values, romantics were no match for the forces of science and industrial progress, but they captured the allegiance of Europe’s intellectual elite, and their influence spread quickly across the Atlantic.24
Transcendentalism mixed together French romanticism and German idealism, but its direct antecedent was the English romantic movement, particularly the writings of William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who saw nature as an archetype of spiritual harmony. On long walks through the Lake District, Coleridge described plants and animals in the naturalist tradition but viewed farmsteads and villages as though they, too, were spontaneous natural creations. His colleague William Wordsworth wrote of the humble dwellings of the Lake District as having “risen, by an instinct of their own, out of the native rock.” Romantics like these saw the pastoral world as a metaphor, a lesson in essential human relations absent the corrosive effects of the Industrial Revolution. In the European tradition, the idea of nature was symbolic; in the hands of America’s poets and philosophers, it was firmly grounded in the physical environment.25
Romanticism crossed the Atlantic at a time when writers like Emerson, Hawthorne, Whittier, Melville, Dickinson, Whitman, Bryant, Cooper, and Longfellow were creating an American literature almost de novo. These were exciting times for American writers. Print culture—books, journals, newspapers, magazines—was growing, aided by advances in education, printing, papermaking, and eyeglass manufacture. Literacy was on the rise, and Americans were hungry for cultural self-improvement.26 This awakening was nationwide, but it was most intense in New England, where Boston minister William Ellery Channing was brokering the synthesis of evangelical Christianity and Enlightenment thinking that brought Unitarianism into the mainstream of New England religious life. Transcendentalism combined the Unitarian message of divine benevolence and free will with the romantic celebration of human emotion, and like the European romantics, transcendentalists accepted nature as a source of this spiritual awakening. Symbols of universal law were embedded in nature, and by reading these symbols the observer transcended reality and gained access to divine truths.27
American transcendentalists were more grounded in nature than European romantics, but Thoreau took this perspective even further. Unlike Emerson, who descended from eight generations of Puritan clergymen, Thoreau was a first-generation intellectual, and he was determined to live his transcendental philosophy deliberately rather than vicariously. Having grown up among versatile Concord farmers in a craft-making family, he was too much the workingman to simply idealize nature; he smelled, tasted, and lived it. Thoreau described a world Emerson and other transcendentalists never really understood. They distrusted the raw power of wild nature, and thus they never fully trusted Thoreau.28
Having returned from New York with no publication prospects, Thoreau began mulling over options that would eventually lead him to the cabin at Walden Pond. As with other aspects of his life, the experience became the focus of ongoing controversy among biographers and critics. The two-and-a-half-year stay at Walden, Clifton Johnson wrote in 1910, was “so unusual a proceeding on the part of a man of his education and cultured tastes [that it] could not help attracting much curious interest.” As Johnson intimates, the event defined Thoreau for later scholars, but the idea of living the primitive life in a rural retreat was not unusual among romantics, and in fact several of Thoreau’s friends had done as much.29 Thoreau embraced the romance of self-sufficient living, but there were more prosaic motives behind the move to Walden. Thoreau’s own household was crowded with family, boarders, and a constant round of visitors, and he needed a quiet place to write. “He had wanted for years to be independent,” biographer R. D. Richardson added; he was twenty-eight and living at home without money, job, or prospects. Higginson put the matter simply:
A young man . . . having a passion for the minute observation of nature . . . takes it into his head to build himself a study . . . in the woods, by the side of a lake. Happening to be poor, . . . he takes a whimsical satisfaction in seeing how cheaply he can erect his hut, and afterwards support himself by the labor of his hands. . . . He goes to the village every day or two, by his own showing, to hear the news. He . . . makes more close and delicate observations on nature than any other American has ever made, and writes the only book yet written in America, to my thinking, that bears an annual perusal. Can it be really true that this is a life so wasted, so unpardonable?30
Thoreau had been looking for a place to settle since moving in with the Emersons in 1841, and a solution presented itself when Emerson purchased land on the pond, intending to build a summer house. The hut provided solitary space and allowed him to remain in his beloved Concord—all at minimal cost. He did not discourage visitors, but the distance from Concord ensured that only a self-selected class of walkers would cross his threshold.31
According to Richardson, the two years at the pond “produced more writing of higher quality over a greater range of subjects . . . than in any other period of his life.” But what made his time in the woods distinctive was his inclination to dress his behavior in the mantle of moral truth. As he wrote later in his book, “I went to the woods because I wished to 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.” He recognized that he was making a virtue of his impecunious life circumstances, but there was a philosophical lesson to be learned: simplifying helped him understand the true worth of living. “The poorer I am, the richer I am.”32
Biographers see the Walden years as a watershed in Thoreau’s writing. While there he completed the manuscript for A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and according to William Condry, his subsequent writing reflected “the optimism and self-assurance he had gained in the leisured solitude of Walden life.” Robert Kuhn McGregor argued it was during the Walden years that he chose to dedicate his life not to the transcendentalist specter of nature but to the real thing. Having sorted out this relationship, he returned briefly to the Emerson household and then moved back to his parents’ home in 1847. “I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there,” he wrote at the end of Walden. He learned that he could survive—indeed, thrive—without the trappings of civilization, and this led him to the great lesson of his widely read book. In proportion as one simplified life, “the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness.”33
It was also during the Walden years that Thoreau began seriously composing the journal he had begun in 1837. His practice was to record virtually any suggestive encounter in the field and craft the best of these into lectures and essays. Early entries recorded simple moral lessons drawn from nature and human nature, but later he became more expressive, documenting his progress toward the exquisite relation to nature that became the hallmark of his writing. As Emerson did in his own journal, Thoreau loaded his entries with seemingly unconnected thoughts to see if they would, by some feat of analogy, cohere. This epigrammatic approach fragmented his writing, but it also gave readers an inexhaustible supply of pithy quotes useful for virtually any occasion—perhaps his greatest source of popular recognition in the century after his death.34
Well before his hermitage at Walden, Thoreau had become the stuff of local legend, and the anecdotes that echoed through the village during his lifetime bore heavily on his reputation in the later nineteenth century. In the compass of their small town, Concord people had more than their share of eccentrics, but even among these Thoreau stood out. Ungainly and standoffish, he dressed in rough, unfashionable clothes and walked with a “long, swinging step of a man who is used to walking great distances.” Celia Frease, a schoolgirl when Thoreau was a young man, recalled his ill-fitting clothes, wrinkled coat, and unpolished boots. “Every hair of his head seemed to have an individuality of its own, and at war with every other hair creating a painful discord.” The artist N. C. Wyeth, who grew up in a town near Concord, remembered these neighbors harboring a “strong distaste” for him. One old-timer claimed that he “never had much use for that loafer,” and another summed him up as a “sort of hermit boor.” Few would have grasped the irony in Emerson’s remark that Thoreau was “a very industrious man, and setting, like all highly organized men, a high value on his time, he seemed the only man of leisure in town.”35
Thoreau did little to correct these impressions. Defensive and uncomfortable in most social settings, he had great difficulty reasoning out the behavior of those he did not know well, and he devoted hundreds of journal entries to his frustrations with those he did. In 1852 he wrote in his journal that “what men call social virtues, good fellowship, is commonly but the virtue of pigs in a litter, which lie close together to keep each other warm.” He was not averse to sharing this opinion with others. An old farmer once remarked, “If he would rather visit with woodchucks than with me and my wife, I haint nothing to say except that it is a little hard on the woodchucks.’” Or as a friend of Margaret Fuller once remarked, “H. Thoreau imitates porcupines successfully.”36
Thoreau’s personality is one more enigma in the makeup of the man and his work. While some villagers described him as aloof, others found him cheery and entertaining. John Albee remembered “a very pretty picture . . . of Thoreau leaning over the fire with a fair girl on either side, which somehow did not comport with the subsequent story I heard of his being a hermit.” He could entertain children for hours with stories, tricks, and huckleberry expeditions, and in hundreds of journal entries he described pleasant conversations with older citizens who helped him understand the town’s natural and human history. He related easily to these folksy men, as he did to his transcendentalist colleagues, but he largely ignored those outside these two circles. As a childhood friend related, “There was a great intermediate class between Emerson and the Canadian woodchopper who would have gladly aided Thoreau if he had been a little more human in his dealings with them.” Literary critics collected these stories, both positive and negative, and found them helpful in understanding his thoughts. Thoreau’s personality beamed through the critical commentary and, like it, changed with the times.37
Thoreau’s public lectures left a similarly inconsistent image. By some accounts, he was a poor lecturer. He read his notes without animation, seldom looked up, and lacked the charm and conviction of a seasoned circuit lecturer. He refused to cheapen himself, as he said, by explaining his thoughts, and thus he remained incomprehensible to those a journalist described as “slow plodders.” In other instances, however, he seemed positive and animated. A Portland (ME) Transcript reviewer pointed to an outpouring of images that kept the audience attentive: “He bewilders you in the mists of transcendentalism, delights you with brilliant imagery, shocks you by his apparent irreverence, and sets you in a roar by his sallies of wit.”38 In either case, editors across the country reproduced the reviews, carrying Thoreau’s reputation beyond the New England lecture circuit.
Thoreau’s reputation was also complicated by his curious habit of imitating Emerson in mannerism, voice, and thought. According to Moncure Conway, this resemblance was “a quiet joke in Concord,” and James Russell Lowell immortalized it in his Fable for Critics, published in 1848:
There comes———, for instance; to see him’s rare sport,
tread in Emerson’s tracks with legs painfully short;
How he jumps, how he strains, and gets red in the face,
To keep step with the mystagogue’s natural pace!
Lowell’s satire dogged Thoreau on the lecture trail. A disappointed Worcester reporter remarked after one lecture that the audience “had looked for a bold, original thinker” but instead was offered up “a better imitation of Emerson than we should have thought possible, even with two years’ seclusion [at Walden Pond] to practice in.” Townsend Scudder believed the characterization was true only while Thoreau was “still groping” his way to maturity, but whatever the case, it was a long-standing barrier to Thoreau’s literary success.39
Thoreau’s first major literary success came in writing about a topic that had little reference to the transcendental philosophy he learned at Emerson’s feet. In 1846, during his second summer at Walden, he traveled to Bangor, Maine, and joined a cousin on a timber-surveying expedition up the Penobscot River. He made a second trip to Maine in the fall of 1853, this time to Moosehead and Chesuncook Lakes, guided by Penobscot Native Joe Aitteon. His third trip in 1857 took him to the headwaters of the north-flowing Allagash River and back down the Penobscot East Branch, paddling with Penobscot guide Joe Polis.40 Mindful of a growing popular interest in wild America, he pitched his account of these three trips to a middle-class audience looking for vicarious adventure in remote places. As in all his writing, he described the colors, scents, sounds, and taste of the woods, but he also worked into his descriptions his thoughtful reflections on the wildness of the human spirit.41
Thoreau published the first of these three essays in the Union Magazine of Literature and the Arts in 1848, and for this he had Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune to thank. Bayrd Taylor, who was managing the magazine at the time, remembered Greeley arriving in his office with a thick manuscript under his arm proclaiming, “Now you must do something for this young man. His name is Thoreau; he lives in a shanty at Walden Pond, near Concord, on $37.21 a year, and he must be encouraged.” Considering Thoreau’s frugality, Taylor offered him $75 for the manuscript, “as it would meet the latter’s expenses for two years to come.” In 1864 the three essays were combined and published as The Maine Woods.42
Another literary endeavor was less successful. Having completed A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers at the pond, in 1849, on the advice of Emerson, he underwrote its publication. He introduced the book, which describes a boating adventure with his brother in 1839, with a compelling narrative image: “The weeds at the bottom gently bending down the stream, shaken by the watery wind . . . were objects of singular interest to me, and at last I resolved to launch myself on its bosom and float whither it would bear me.” From the title and the opening lines, Week might have appeared a familiar New England pastoral composition, but rather than evoke images of folk and nature, Thoreau mixed into the travel narrative a combination of nature facts, local lore, poetry, and vaguely connected commentaries on philosophy, classical verse, theology, and the human condition. He was, as biographer Laura Dassow Walls said, “experimenting wildly with form,” combining thoughts on nature with a radical critique of religion, slavery, industrialization, and war. Natural history supplied the imagery and transcendentalism the message, but as a biographer put it, the rivers in the title were “often little more than a dimly fluvial backcloth for the endless flow of the author’s philosophical reflections.”43
Week brought Thoreau’s first round of critical reviews, and some were indeed laudatory. English writer Sophia Dobson Collet, an expert on Eastern mystic religions, considered the philosophic digressions a tribute to American individualism, and James Russell Lowell found the combination of nature study and literary discourse compelling. But even Lowell, no stranger to ponderous thought, found the digressions tedious. The sections on Buddha, Persius, friendship, “and we know not what,” he insisted, were “like snags, jolting us headforemost out of our places as we are rowing placidly up stream or drifting down.” Horace Greeley assigned the Tribune’s review to Unitarian minister George Ripley, a man of broad influence who might have helped cement the loose blocks of Thoreau’s nascent literary reputation. Unfortunately, Ripley found the book troubling. He favored its general tone but raised two themes that would resonate through critical commentary over the next half century. First, the philosophy seemed “second-hand, imitative, often exaggerated”—a reference to Thoreau’s association with Emerson. Second, he found Thoreau’s transcendentalism a poorly disguised form of “Pantheistic egotism.” Others echoed Ripley’s pronouncement on the book’s impiety. Thoreau’s blunt observation that “when one enters a village the church, not only really, but from association, is the ugliest looking building in it” appeared in numerous reviews.44
Of a run of 1,000 copies, Thoreau sold only 219, partly because his publisher made no effort to advertise or distribute it. His friend Franklin Sanborn insisted that Thoreau “rejoiced in the slow sale of his first book,” since this left him free from solicitations for lectures. No doubt Thoreau expressed these face-saving sentiments, but in fact the book’s fate left a deep impression. Praise for the passages on the river itself convinced him to shift his attention from arid philosophizing to nature description in subsequent essays, while the harsh criticism of the rest of the book delayed publication of Walden for nearly a decade. Partly because of the book’s failure, Thoreau’s relation with Emerson cooled considerably in the early 1850s. Thoreau had written Week in order to live up to Emerson’s philosophical expectations, and its diffuse structure was patterned after Emerson’s own writing style. Emerson encouraged him to seek a publisher, and when none could be found, he suggested Thoreau underwrite the production costs. The book’s failure dashed Emerson’s hopes for a great American transcendental poet, and it saddled Thoreau with the cost of publication. Thoreau’s subsequent journal entries became increasingly literal, inspired less by Emerson’s quest for transcendence than by Harvard naturalist Louis Agassiz’s field methods.45 In contrast to Emerson’s idealism, Thoreau grew increasingly grounded in nature. In addition, the young handyman-scholar had developed a close, albeit Platonic, relation to Emerson’s wife, Lidian, while he was living in the Emerson household, and this may have played a part in the rupture. Thoreau resented Emerson’s long absence in view of Lidian’s delicate health, and as Robert Sattelmeyer says, the “inevitable suggestions of Lancelot and Arthur could not have been long out of his mind.”46
Compared to Week, Thoreau’s second book was a success; all but 256 copies of Walden’s original run of 2,000 sold in 1854, the first year of publication. The book was not reissued during his lifetime, but a second printing appeared in 1862, immediately after his death, and a third and fourth in 1863 and 1864. With Walden, Thoreau had the benefit of a more aggressive publisher. James T. Fields of the Boston firm Ticknor & Fields brought to the book an extraordinary talent for marketing. At a time when most Americans instinctively turned to Europe for their reading material, Ticknor & Fields was transforming its listing—Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Stowe, Lowell, Holmes, Whittier—into an American literary renaissance, and Thoreau was an important beneficiary of this achievement.47
Thoreau claimed to have written the book to satisfy his neighbors’ curiosity about what he ate and what he spent, but his true purpose was much more serious. Having simplified his needs during his time alone in the woods, he could see that his neighbors were blinded by a compulsive drive to accumulate. This burden led him to Walden’s most famous passage: “The mass of men,” he wrote, “lead lives of quiet desperation”; people had become “so occupied with the factitious cares and . . . coarse labors of life, that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them.” Although he made his point by satirizing his Concord neighbors, Walden was a genial book with fewer of the blunt, iconoclastic statements that colored the reception of Week. His critique was not so much aimed at material things themselves as the motives behind their acquisition. “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!” he advised. “I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.” Again, this was not a goal in itself but rather a means to achieve higher goals—leisure, nature, contemplation, spiritual awakening, or true friendship.48
Reaction to Walden suggests a promising young writer, but the book was not heralded as the literary masterpiece it would become at the hands of twentieth-century critics and scholars. The Portland Transcript dismissed it as the “quaint . . . production of a crooked genius,” and the Worcester Palladium added that the book’s odd insights left the reader “no wiser in the end.” Neither wholly pastoral nor completely transcendental, Walden was difficult to describe. A New York Times critic situated it in the eighteenth-century genre of English jest books: comic satires that made light of virtually anything held sacrosanct, without expressing a hint of compassion. Others interpreted it more literally as an adventure story written by a man who lived like a king on hoe cakes and water. “He . . . builds his own house, cooks his own victuals, makes and mends his own clothes, works, reads, thinks as he pleases, and writes this book to chronicle his success in the experiment.” The “Economy” chapter raised a great deal of skepticism, the common impression being that “anybody could live on six cents a day when mother’s cupboard was close at hand and well stocked.”49
Those who considered Walden a proposal for reform were equally confused. The idea that simplicity could resolve the great social issues of the day seemed unconvincing, and in an era when most social engineering depended on collective action or moral persuasion, Thoreau’s emphasis on the individual seemed “repulsively selfish.” No one, a reviewer admonished, “has a right to live for himself alone, away from the interests, the affections, and the sufferings of his kind.”50 With industrialization at full flood in the 1850s, readers were not prepared for Walden’s antimaterialist message. Jesse Clements, writing in the Western Literary Messenger, saw Thoreau “at war with the political economy of the age.” In Clements’s view, the lust for material goods was the very engine of progress. “To give a man a new want is to . . . conquer his habitual rust and idleness.” There was nothing virtuous in homespun and linsey-woolsey, a Boston Daily Atlas reviewer added; the preference for “clean, well made clothes over dirty, ragged ones, scarcely argues any moral degradation or idle folly.”51
Nor did Walden fit easily into the transcendentalist genre. Thoreau forced together Emerson’s optimistic message of spiritual redemption and his own reclusive cynicism, and the mixture was often self-negating. The descriptions lacked the pietistic overtones usually attached to a study of this sort, and Thoreau evaded the classic romantic formula that saw the adventurer returning from the wilderness reassured of humanity’s goodness and God’s greatness. The stay at Walden Pond seemed to sharpen rather than assuage his cynicism. There were essential truths in Walden, a Boston reviewer observed, but there was “not a page, a paragraph giving one sign of the liberality, charitableness, kind feeling, [or] generosity” that would make it a true celebration of human freedom. In a widely reproduced review in Knickerbocker Magazine, an anonymous writer compared Walden to a recent autobiography by P. T. Barnum. Both were written by “bold and original thinkers,” one who retreated into nature to escape civilization and another who reproduced nature’s curiosities to bring civilization to his doorstep. Barnum had conceived an elaborate sham to satisfy his lust for of possessions, and Thoreau had conceived an equally elaborate sham—the Walden experiment—to expose the error of lusting after possessions. Neither had any idea of “laboring very hard with their hands for a living,” and both were determined to support themselves principally through a “skillful combination of nature with art.” One “sneers at and ridicules the pursuits of his contemporaries with the same cheerfulness and good-will that the other cajoles and fleeces them.” Both were artists, both skilled at self-advertising, both capable of making “large contributions to the science of human nature,” and both, finally, “humbugs—one a town humbug and the other a rural humbug.”52
The book garnered an impressive collection of positive reviews as well, again reflecting the shifting cultural currents in these antebellum years. According to historians Bradley Dean and Gary Scharnhorst, “By the end of August 1854, Walden had in fact been praised in over thirty newspapers and magazines from Maine to Ohio.” Most commented on the accuracy of his nature descriptions, and at least a few complimented Walden as a sincere attempt by a spiritually grounded writer to “find the minimum due to his body, and the maximum due to his soul.” Given the weight of these positive reviews, Walden marked a turning point in Thoreau’s reputation. In the years after 1854, followers appeared in Concord, seeking him out as they sought out Emerson, and they brought with them what Alcott called “the disciple’s faith in their master’s thoughts.” After his death this following would congeal into a cadre of defenders anxious to draw him out into the literary limelight, and this impulse would play an important part in his rise to fame in the closing decades of the century.53
Even as Thoreau was gaining stature as a nature writer, he was being drawn in another direction by the national debate over slavery, an embroilment that would contribute significantly to his reputation as a principled contrarian. Thoreau’s abolitionist expressions drew from a tradition of early reformist ideals. In 1828 William Ladd of Maine had founded the American Peace Society, predicated on the principles of nonresistance, and in the 1840s utopian reformer John Humphrey Noyes transformed religious perfectionism—the possibility of living free of sin—into a way of life at his communities in Vermont, New York, and Connecticut. In the same decade, William Miller convinced thousands of men and women in rural New England and New York that the Second Coming of Christ was eminent. Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison emerged from the same apocalyptic mold, believing like Noyes that the state had to be destroyed before the nation could be redeemed. Thoreau, already the village rebel, absorbed these idealistic convictions—passive resistance from Ladd, religious perfectionism from Noyes, and apocalyptic change from Miller and Garrison—and became the spokesman for the abolitionist ideas of his transcendentalist friends and family.54 The Walden experiment demonstrated the power of the deed, and he applied this lesson in his abolitionist activism. When Congress authorized war with Mexico in 1846, he stopped paying his poll tax, and the Concord sheriff, after weeks of badgering, locked him in jail. He was released the following morning, but as at Walden he gave this simple act a philosophical justification steeped in American revolutionary ideology. In the essay that recounts his night in jail, originally titled “Resistance to Civil Government,” he argued that the state was created purely for the convenience of the citizenry and had no right to force moral obligations on those who created it. In higher matters, it was conscience, not the state, that served as the citizen’s guide.55
The essay reached only a limited audience during his lifetime, but the same thoughts gained notoriety when he voiced them in public. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Law, which directed northern states to return refugees from slavery caught in their jurisdiction, brought the issue of slavery home to Massachusetts, and in May 1854 Anthony Burns, a victim of the law, was tried in Boston along with those who attempted to shield him. Thoreau participated in the public outcry that ensued, delivering a series of speeches in which he denounced not only the law but also the commonwealth that enforced it. His indignation was tinged with philosophic anarchy and a hint of utopian perfectionism: “Heroes can live on nuts, and freemen sun themselves in the clefts of rocks, rather than sell their liberty for this pottage of slavery. We, the few honest neighbors, can help one another; and should the state ask any favors of us, we can take the matter into consideration leisurely, and at our convenience give a respectful answer.” During these years Thoreau published other social and political essays, and his fiery tone gave the public a new Thoreau persona. Even the Antislavery Standard raised its editorial eyebrows at the incendiary rhetoric produced by a man who was “understood to inhabit a small hut, in an out-of-the-way place, in Concord, Mass.”56
Thoreau became more involved in abolitionist activities when Franklin Sanborn introduced him to Kansas radical John Brown in 1857. Thoreau, Emerson, and Alcott were unaware of Brown’s plans for a raid on the Harpers Ferry Armory, but they admired his devotion to principle, and when word of the incident spread north, Thoreau commemorated Brown in a speech delivered in Boston before an audience of twenty-five hundred. At a time when most Americans considered Brown a traitor, Thoreau lionized him. One Boston commentator characterized the speech as a mix of “just and striking remarks” and “foolish and ill-natured ones” and reminded readers that “the lecturer was cultivating beans and killing woodchucks” at Walden while more committed partisans were laboring to turn public sentiment against slavery.57 In December 1859 Brown was hanged for treason, and after filling his journal with indignant prose, Thoreau rang the town church bell to gather a crowd and delivered a plea, as he said, not for Brown’s life “but for . . . his immortal life.” Quite possibly, Thoreau was the first American to speak publicly in defense of Brown, and again newspaper coverage was extensive. The events of that fateful fall and winter fueled Thoreau’s cynicism. In October he wrote in his journal, “I speak to the stupid and timid chattels of the north, pretending to read history and their Bibles, desecrating every house and every day they breathe in!”58
Although his views on society grew darker in the shadow of the slavery issue, Thoreau’s status as a member of the Concord community improved in his last years. Almost inadvertently, his lectures, writing, and surveying earned him a respectable living, and when the family business shifted from pencils to high-quality powdered graphite, its finances stabilized. As demand for his services as lecturer and as surveyor grew, Thoreau assumed yet another persona. “Managing success,” Walls writes, “was a new and disconcerting prospect.” Those who earlier viewed him as Emerson’s shadow found, as William Lyon Phelps wrote in 1924, that “his chief imitation of Emerson was in his absolute originality and independence, qualities common to both teacher and pupil.” And in a rare moment of enthusiasm, Thoreau reciprocated in his journal: “How I love the simple, reserved countrymen, my neighbors. . . . For nearly twoscore years I have known, at a distance, these long-suffering men . . . and now feel a certain tenderness for them, as if this long probation were but the prelude to an eternal friendship.”59
Thoreau’s health began declining in 1855 when an unexplained paralysis left him debilitated for months. By 1857 he was feeling the effects of chronic tuberculosis, a disease common in his family. During the summer of 1861 he spent eight weeks in Minnesota, attempting to improve his health. His recovery was temporary, and by winter he had accepted his fate. In these last months he lay in the front room in his mother’s house and with his sister Sophia’s help began revising his Maine woods essays. He received a great deal of sympathy and seemed to realize, perhaps for the first time, that his neighbors genuinely cared for him. “He came to feel very differently toward people,” George Hoar remarked, “and said if he had known he wouldn’t have been so offish.” Amid a stream of visitors he worked on the essays. On May 6, 1862, at age forty-four, he died “without pain or struggle . . . his last audible words being ‘moose’ and ‘Indian.’” In a letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s wife, Mary Mann described his last days as peaceful, leaving his family “so fully possessed of his faith in the Immortal Life that they seemed almost to have entered it with him.”60
In many ways, Thoreau’s literary odyssey began with his death. Neither of his books had circulated widely while he was alive, and the obituaries in the press highlighted his strength of character and skills at plant identification rather than his writing. Locally, he was remembered as a “man of simple tastes, hardy habits, and of preternatural powers of observation,” who chose to live “without the least ambition to be rich, or to be popular, and almost without sympathy in any of the common motives of men around him.”61 Thus his reputation stood in 1862.
He was fortunate, however, in having left behind devoted friends conversant with the literary world and a mountain of unpublished manuscripts—a near lifetime of thoughts on nature, individuality, and the state.
Over the next half century, this legacy fueled an ongoing and vigorous stream of commentary as his manuscripts were published, reviewed, and interpreted. But despite his growing recognition, he remained, as this brief biography suggests, an enigma. His unorthodox but suggestive life choices and his provocative literary legacy left biographers and critics without firm footing. “And so we have Thoreau in one after another Protean disguise,” literary historian Ethel Seybold wrote as late as 1951, “Thoreau the hermit; Thoreau the naturalist; Thoreau the scholar, student of the classics, of oriental lore, of New England legend and history, of the life of the North American Indian; Thoreau the primitivist, the ‘apostle of the wild’; Thoreau the man of letters, writer of perfect prose; even Thoreau the walker.” Each of these guises was fostered by a scholar or critic who believed that in the welter of contradiction there lurked an essential Thoreau, and finding him became the holy grail of Thoreau scholarship—one of the great quests of American literature.62 After a century and a half of criticism, it is safe to say that this essential Thoreau is knowable only in the context of the time in which he is read.
But despite these conflicting incarnations, perhaps the critics and scholars are right. Thoreau loved nature, and in nature he discovered his true self, and this was the lodestone that drew together all the seemingly contradictory impressions of the man. According to Daniel Mason, Thoreau trusted the insights that came to him through nature, and he was rewarded with an extraordinary ability to communicate these intimations to others. “He was as fresh and happy as the morning he walked through; as brave and gallant as the dawn-heralding chanticleer, whose song he celebrated.” Knowing nature, he knew himself; knowing himself, he knew nature. This was the essential Thoreau, and this was the quality that made him a bellwether of America’s search for the meaning of nature.63 This is how we shall assess the strange and meandering legacy of his life and writing in the decades after May 6, 1862.