In a 2015 New Yorker article provocatively titled “Pond Scum,” feature writer Kathryn Schulz questioned Thoreau’s long-standing position at the apex of the American literary canon. She opened with a scene from his book Cape Cod, in which he described the horrific loss of life that resulted when the immigrant ship St. John, bound from Galway to Boston, went aground off Cohasset. Thoreau stood on the beach, as she relates, unmoved by the carnage, sympathizing rather with the wind and waves that carried the bodies shoreward. Ignoring the nuances in his description—the numbing effect of death on this scale and the metaphorical indifference of the sea itself—she presented a portrait of Thoreau oddly reminiscent of the post–Civil War critics who disparaged his personality in order to subvert his literary standing. Like so many before her, she determined that he was, “in the fullest sense of the word, self-obsessed: narcissistic, fanatical about self-control, adamant that he required nothing beyond himself to understand and thrive in the world,” and so his literary output must be flawed. To confirm this she drew on Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1880 critique in Cornhill Magazine, which Stevenson later recanted, she neglects to say, and on Vincent Buranelli’s “The Case against Thoreau,” a tirade on the evils of moral absolutism published in the later years of the McCarthy era. According to Schulz, Thoreau’s most distinctive aphorism, “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” was arrogant and assumptive: “It is a mystery to me how a claim so simultaneously insufferable and absurd ever entered the canon of popular quotations.” And in like manner, she stripped the literary apparatus—parody, paradox, symbol, metaphor, association—from other Thoreau commentary. Taken out of context, his prose fell leaden at her feet.
Ignoring the possibility that none of the American canon is consumed avidly in modern times, Schulz argued that Thoreau remains popular simply because no one reads him. Adults rely on dim high school impressions that he hated work and challenged the establishment and forget the fact that his writing is “functionally adolescent in tone.” She concluded with a thought calculated to raise eyebrows among her liberal New Yorker readers: Thoreau’s definition of freedom rested on a foundation of misanthropy, and hence he was “far closer in spirit to Ayn Rand” than to the great champions of liberty he supposedly inspired.1
Schulz might have thought that she had, at last, laid to rest the ghost of Thoreau, but in fact her interpretation was by no means novel. At least once in every decade since 1862 an author appeared, denouncing his personality in order to highlight the flaws in his writing, and the decades since 1970 were no exception. In 1977 Richard Lebeaux, in his Young Man Thoreau, applied Erik Erikson’s characterization of adolescent identity crisis to Thoreau and uncovered the psychic struggles that caused him to withdraw into nature. Predicated on an older image of Thoreau family life—a dominating mother and retiring father—Lebeaux’s psychobiography added little to the image contrived by McCarthy-era scholars such as Perry Miller and Leon Edel, but in the next decade the Berkeley professor Richard Bridgman pursued the same line of reasoning in his Dark Thoreau. Thoreau’s self-loathing, according to Bridgman, was “manifested most vividly in his imagery,” which included “the mutilated bodies of men, animals, birds, and reptiles, the battered remnants of destroyed life.” In the 1990s Robert Milder published Reimagining Thoreau, which once again revealed Thoreau’s “concern with masculine identity” and coupled this dark psychoanalytic profile with close textual analysis to explain the inconsistencies in various drafts of Walden.2
A challenge of a different sort came in 2012 with publication of Robert Sullivan’s curious The Thoreau You Don’t Know: How Reevaluating the Dean of Green Makes Us Rethink Our World. Responding to a concern among academics that Walden was appearing less frequently on high school English syllabi, Sullivan presented a new, lighter Thoreau whose personality was reminiscent of that created in the 1870s by his friends Harrison Blake, Ellery Channing, and Bronson Alcott. Sullivan’s Thoreau was teen friendly; he played in the woods, wrote humorous satire, and was “as practical as he was philosophical, as silly as he was serious.” The Thoreau Sullivan crafted was eminently approachable, but he lacked the critical edge and intense symbolism that 1960s radicals and environmentalists found so valuable. According to a reviewer, it was “time to pack the old Thoreau—austere, high-minded, solitary—in mothballs and break out the new . . . , a wisecracking, subversive, entrepreneurial party boy, as likely to dance a jig and break into song as preach at you.”3 Scott Sandage introduced an equally devitalized Thoreau in the opening chapter of his curious Born Losers. Taking the famous “quiet desperation” aphorism as text, Sandage pointed out that the promise of American life in fact left many individuals feeling desperately unfulfilled. He offered Thoreau—the man who walked east to Cape Cod rather than follow the dictates of manifest destiny—as comfort for all those who thought their lives fell short of the American Dream. “Let us remember not to strive upwards too long,” the original born loser warned. As a reviewer put it, Sullivan presented readers with “an oddball who enjoyed sauntering more than striving, berry picking more than bill counting.”4 The Thoreau imagined by Sullivan and Sandage was far more human than the Thoreau characterized by Schulz, but it had little in common with the righteous and controversial figure that emerged out of the political passions of the 1960s and 1970s.
A more ominous challenge came from the iconoclastic environmentalist Bill McKibben, whose 1989 New Yorker article “The End of Nature” centered on Thoreau’s 1846 ascent of Mount Katahdin. From the mountaintop, nature seemed wondrous because it was fresh and unspoiled, but almost nothing at this modern juncture could inspire in the same way. Humans, McKibben pointed out, had altered the foundation of all natural systems, even the most remote, and in depriving nature of its independence, they deprived it of its spirituality. Thoreau was important because he saw nature as a portal to divinity; desacralizing nature would render him irrelevant. What would become of a classic like The Maine Woods when even the Katahdin wilderness was a human artifact—when “the great pines around its base have been genetically improved”?5
Challenges like these were not new, of course. As the columnist Albert Southwick pointed out in the Boston Globe, Thoreau had been faulted over the years “for his science, his nature studies, his politics, his economics, his philosophy, his prudery, his dismissive remarks about women and his egoism.” Yet for all that, “his disciples multiply.” As Southwick suggested, the connection between condemnation and perseverance was more than casual; even as detractors such as Stevenson, Buranelli, Miller, and Edel hammered at his reputation, he steadily gained in prominence—in no small measure because he was indeed controversial.6 Commenting on this point, Elizabeth Hall Witherell of the Princeton Thoreau Project noted that of all great American writers, Thoreau “provoked the strongest popular reactions, both positive and negative.” This, she thought, would ensure his place in the literary pantheon. Indeed, a 1991 Modern Language Association survey found Walden still the “single most important work to teach in the country’s nineteenth-century literature.”7 What, then, was there about the writer and his personality that sparked such controversy at a time when the passions of the 1960s and 1970s—civil rights, war, and the environment—seemed to have cooled?
The academic disciplines that came to maturity at the turn of the century found Thoreau controversial in new ways. In gender studies, for example, some scholars interpreted his writing as an example of masculine hegemony over nature, while others described him as withdrawing from the “masculine world of commerce and industry.” Postmodernists saw him as obsessed with “self-fashioning” but quarreled about the selfhood he fashioned: Was he a naturalist, transcendentalist, or simply a nonconformist?8 Students of literary canon brought to light the complicated process by which he became, by the end of the nineteenth century, “a star of the first magnitude in the firmament of American letters” but differed in attributing his success to his transcendentalist friends, to the market-based decisions of his publishers, or to the intrinsic value of his literary genius.9 Environmental historians used him as a literary benchmark but offered no new insight into his role in American history. In Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, Donald Worster positioned him at a critical moment in a succession of ecological thinkers dating back to Gilbert White. William Cronon opened his influential Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England with Thoreau contemplating the degradation of nature in Concord, and Theodore Steinberg introduced his Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England with Thoreau and his brother boating on the much-diminished waters of the Merrimack River. As Kent Curtis observed, he was less an actor in environmental history than a narrative device.10
Political scientists were more receptive to Thoreau’s agency but were again divided on his meaning. In her 1994 book, Thoreau’s Nature, Ethics, Politics and the Wild, Jane Bennett ticked off the various ways his political ideas were still relevant: “claustrophobia, routinization, and the . . . will to mastery are . . . high on Thoreau’s list of dangers. . . . He feels oppressed by a distant and centralizing government; he is horrified by the violent destruction of woodlands and the idiotic accumulation of consumption items.”11 His political thought was relevant to modern society, but some critics found it more subdued than those who read him in the turbulent 1960s. In his 1939 biography, Henry Canby had declared Thoreau a reluctant reformer, more interested in nature than politics, and although 1960s scholars rejected this interpretation, it gained appeal in the decades that followed. Michael Bennett argued that Thoreau saw slavery largely in symbolic terms; “inward redemption” was more important than redemption of the South. In To Set This World Right: The Antislavery Movement in Thoreau’s Concord, Sandra Harbert Petrulionis described his political commitments as intermittent. “He denounced collective reform movements and abolitionist leaders, but on more than one occasion he also acted . . . in concert with the local antislavery societies to which his mother, sisters, and aunts loyally belonged.”12
Others, however, preferred a more politically impassioned Thoreau. Jay Parnini’s Thirteen Books That Changed America revived the antimaterialist philosopher of the 1920s and 1930s who challenged the foundations of an acquisitive economy. Others brought back the Thoreau of the 1960s. Brent Powell saw likenesses between the Concord rebel and Martin Luther King Jr., both of them deeply committed to equality, justice, and the call to higher conscience. Labor and environmental historian Chad Montrie framed Walden as a foil used to draw attention to the degradation of work in industrial society.13 In political science as in other disciplines, controversy animated Thoreau scholarship. He was, as Albert Southwick said in his Boston Globe article, “misanthropic, prudish, celibate, suspicious of causes, and obsessed with solitude,” but at the same time a “friend of animals, lover of nature, mystic, tax-refuser, foe of government, antiwar publicist, advocate of open spaces, partisan of Native Americans, critic of industrial ‘progress’ and scorner of the consumer ethic.” As long as he could simultaneously inspire, enrage, and mystify, he “won’t go away.”14
Thoreau continued to intrigue academics because he validated deep-seated American values even while he criticized them. To the lay reader, however, he remained popular as the voice of nature, and this, of course, was the foundation of his iconic status. The millennial years brought an outpouring of popular biographies, anthologies, and essays that highlighted Thoreau’s nature writing, and among the most significant of these was Bradley Dean’s Faith in a Seed, which reproduced several popular Thoreau nature essays along with the unpublished and partially completed “Dispersion of Seeds.” The anthology was a stunning event—the first new Thoreau manuscript to appear in print in more than a century—but it was also important because it set in motion a debate that crossed over the boundary between academic research and popular reading. In rereading his journals and essays, Dean and others discovered several “new” Thoreaus: he was America’s first Darwinian naturalist, its first “deep ecologist,” its first authority on humanized ecologies, and its first modern climatologist. These new insights highlight the way Thoreau—and the idea of nature—had changed since the 1970s.15
The connection to Darwin was a major advance in Thoreau scholarship, attributable in good part to Max Oelschlaeger’s 1991 Idea of Wilderness from Prehistory to the Age of Ecology. In his chapter on Thoreau, Oelschlaeger argued that he “clearly . . . grasped the principle of evolution” and saw the cosmos as a “living continuum in which the higher is an elaborated . . . arrangement of the lower.” Two years later Gary Paul Nabhan and R. D. Richardson argued in the introduction to Faith in a Seed that Thoreau actually anticipated Darwin by using methodologies that “did not become fully articulated in evolutionary ecology until the early 1970s.”16
The three collaborators on Faith in a Seed—Dean, Richardson, and Nabhan—also credited Thoreau as America’s first deep ecologist, an attribution that once again embroiled him in controversy. The term had been coined in 1973 by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss, an ecocentrist who argued that the human species had no right to reduce the diversity of life on the planet or to judge the worth of other life forms by their contribution to civilization.17 The most thorough recognition of Thoreau’s ecocentrism came with Lawrence Buell’s 1995 book, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture, which brought to light a new “green Thoreau” whose view of nature combined transcendental introspection and objective observation. Viewed as a deep-ecology classic, Walden, according to Buell, looked “more like a mode of dissent” than an expression of transcendental philosophy.18 Others agreed. Mark Hamilton Lytle compared him to Rachel Carson in his 2007 biography of the latter, and in the journal Conservation Biology, Matthew Child used Thoreau’s writing to argue against anthropocentric conservation strategies that judged the worth of each component in a natural system according to its social or economic value. Thoreau, as “an unapologetic . . . freedom fighter for nature,” offered an ecocentric alternative that would be immensely useful to twenty-first-century conservation.19
In the journal Between the Species, Don Mortland cautioned environmentalists like these to read Thoreau a little more carefully; he could be claimed by utilitarians, Mortland argued, just as easily as he was claimed by “New Age” ecologists. In his Nature Writing: The Pastoral Impulse in America, Don Scheese likewise imagined Thoreau inhabiting a netherworld between biocentric and anthropocentric approaches, and environmental historian Kent Curtis pictured Thoreau as generally content with the way farmers, fishers, and loggers used nature. Nowhere, according to Curtis, did he suggest “a loss of natural balance at the hands of human society.”20 Despite the lack of consensus, commentators found ways to incorporate Thoreau’s thoughts into this newest turn in natural philosophy.
The debate over deep ecology drew attention to a third new interpretation of Thoreau’s contribution to ecological thought. Scholars recognized his Concord descriptions as the first attempt in this country to understand nature in a landscape heavily altered by human activity. Daniel Botkin’s 2001 No Man’s Garden: Thoreau and a New Vision for Civilization and Nature drew attention to Thoreau’s fondness for what he called a “partially cultivated country.” A conservation biologist, Botkin had abandoned the idea of climax ecology—nature essentialized as a static and harmonized balance of forces—for a new ecological paradigm based on a dynamic and somewhat chaotic system of relationships. Thoreau, he pointed out, had no particular faith in the ancient and metaphorical “balance of nature,” and this put his widely read book The Maine Woods in a new light. While most scholars viewed the book as a celebration of wilderness, Botkin saw it as a record of human activity, with loggers, trappers, hunters, and Native Americans busily at work in the woods. Here, as in the fields and woodlots of Concord, Thoreau pioneered a new approach to understanding the human contribution to a dynamic natural ecology.21 Eight years later David Foster published Thoreau’s Country: Journey through a Transformed Landscape, again emphasizing the dynamic qualities in the Concord landscape. Foster combined the rich ecological data in Thoreau’s journals with his own expertise as a forester to offer a convincing portrait of New England as a natural landscape in perpetual transition. Like Botkin, he presented Thoreau not as a defender of wilderness but as a naturalist thoroughly at home in the domesticated world and keenly aware of the anthropogenic changes taking place around him. Botkin and Foster were the first scholars since Leo Stoller, in his 1957 After Walden, to put this human-nature interface at the center of Thoreau’s ecological thinking, and their writing suggests a new understanding of the society-nature relationship in the decades after the environmental era.22
Thoreau’s close inspection of the Concord landscape yielded another set of insights that put him in the public eye. Over the years, he amassed a record of plant and animal seasonality that proved invaluable to those interested in climate change. His observations on the life cycles of nearly six hundred species drew the attention of the Boston University biologist Richard Primack, who found plants flowering about one week earlier in Concord than in Thoreau’s day, due to global climate change and the urban heat-island effect. Primack and his colleagues located several newly arrived plant species, and despite the fact that 35 to 40 percent of Concord’s land area had been protected by 2007, some 27 percent of Thoreau’s wildflowers had disappeared. The seasonal markers Thoreau used, as Michelle Nijhuis pointed out in Smithsonian magazine, were “the pulse of the planet, and everything from agriculture to allergy outbreaks depend on their timing.” Unbeknownst to him, Thoreau was documenting the arrival of the Anthropocene.23
Newspaper feature writers also used Thoreau as a baseline for documenting ecological change. In 1990, for instance, the wildlife ecologist Anne LaBastille published an article in the Boston Globe titled “If Thoreau Could See It Now,” tracing the voyage he made with his brother on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers in 1839. Where Thoreau had camped out along the riverbank, modern-day canoeists left the river treading “through a rubble of old carpets, bent bikes, plastic items and building materials,” and where Thoreau saw crystal waters as a transcendental metaphor, the canoeing party endured the stench of raw sewage. LaBastille concluded with Thoreau’s expression of hope and resignation: “Perchance, after a few thousands of years, if the fishes will be patient, and pass their summers elsewhere . . . the Grass-ground River [will] run clear again.”24
Like his ecological sensibilities, Thoreau’s connection to wilderness remained controversial. In his study of American nature writers, Don Scheese, like Botkin, reminded readers that Thoreau encountered a great deal of human activity in The Maine Woods. Scheese concluded, however, that he was nonetheless content with “reenvisioning a ‘virgin’ nature”—constructing a wilderness of the mind. James Papa made a similar argument in the Midwest Quarterly. Was the Maine woods a true wilderness? The evidence of human activity was everywhere, but Thoreau was nonetheless intent on fashioning “a landscape unconquered by man.” According to Papa, the resulting literary images filled a “desperate need in the American psyche.”25
It was in this way, as a champion of idealized places, that Thoreau was drawn into the major academic debate over the idea of wilderness in the millennial age. In 1996, at a point where the major preservationist battles of the late twentieth century had been won or lost, the environmental historian William Cronon announced that the time had come to rethink the idea of wilderness. His controversial essay “The Trouble with Wilderness” began with a phrase that had inspired preservationist activity since the 1950s—Thoreau’s iconic “In Wildness is the preservation of the World.” The wildness Thoreau celebrated, Cronon insisted, was a “human creation,” an ideal as much as a reality. As such, it was loaded with “some of the deepest core values of the culture that created and idealized it.” In the present era this symbol-laden archetype had become a means of escaping a long history of environmental degradation. It preserved the illusion, according to Cronon, that by setting aside a value-laden nature in remote places, “we can somehow wipe clean the slate of our past and return to the tabula rasa that supposedly existed before we began to leave our marks on the world.”26 Fixed on preserving wilderness, we fail to preserve the environment we actually inhabit.
Among the many challenges to Cronon’s essay was Donald Worster’s “Thoreau and the American Passion for Wilderness,” a brief article published in the Concord Saunterer in 2002. As Worster related, it had become fashionable by that time, on both the Right and the Left, to attack the wilderness movement as misguided, antihuman, elitist, alienating, or racist, but Worster chose to stick with Thoreau’s dictum that wildness would preserve the world. The Wilderness Act, he insisted, was one of America’s great legislative accomplishments, and for this he credited Thoreau. “In claiming a career as inspector of the wild, Thoreau is doing more than justifying himself to his readers. He is saying what no one else before him has said so emphatically: that wild nature is worthy of the same respect, devotion, energy, and time that taming the land or other ‘trammeling’ occupations demand.” Thoreau was important because he believed not only in the idea of wilderness but in the wilderness world itself, and he was adamant in associating this wilderness with absolute freedom. Thoreau’s wilderness was a place “where one could go to escape from . . . all the faces of unfreedom,” and viewed in this way it is a corrective to the abstractions of “freedom” that gave corporations license to exploit nature around the world.27
Did the millennial decades sustain Thoreau’s status as a popular icon? The answer seemed clear in 1990 during a national controversy over a proposed condominium and office development near Walden Pond. To block the project, rock singer Don Henley staged a benefit concert in Worcester that featured, among other singers and celebrities, Jimmy Buffett, Bonnie Raitt, Bob Seger, Carrie Fisher, Ed Begley Jr., and members of Henley’s band, the Eagles. Henley purchased the disputed property and went on to establish the Walden Woods Project to protect more land around the pond. To help fund this he published Heaven Is Under Our Feet, a best-selling collection of sixty-eight essays by well-known personalities who attested to Thoreau’s legacy and portrayed Walden as a symbol of untainted nature. “With breathtaking foresight,” Senator Edward M. Kennedy wrote in his contribution, Thoreau “saw the trend of the nation’s increasingly industrialized society . . . and spoke to it in terms that are equally relevant to our own age.”28
Thoreau remained controversial, as Schulz, Sullivan, Botkin, Cronon, and others remind us, but this was because he, more than any other classic American writer, trained his exquisite prose on matters of deep concern to the nation. Scholars and popularizers alike wove his thoughts into the fundamental social questions of the day: individualism versus community, solitude versus commitment, conscience versus law, particularity versus universality, civilization versus nature. His intense and sustained self-scrutiny had much to offer in an era when selfhood had become dangerously externalized. In an age overwhelmed by digitized information, he stands out, as Robert Sullivan said, as the “secular priest of solitude.” Above all, he remained America’s “all-purpose symbol of environmentalism,” as Jane Bennett put it, feeding the nation’s passion “not only for the security of a provident nature, but even more for the wild caprice of an order which transgresses our self-imposed limits.” Why read Walden? SueEllen Campbell asked rhetorically. “Because it challenges us to live with passion, curiosity, mindfulness. . . . Eyes wide open! Pay attention! . . . Know where we live and what we live for; simplify.”29
Thoreau will continue to symbolize nature for America, but just how this symbolism will take shape remains indeterminate. In 1997 Elizabeth Hall Witherell predicted that the “definitive” biography of Thoreau “would never be written” because each era will have to generate a Thoreau of its own. This in itself will guarantee his prominence over the coming generations. As Albert Southwick wrote in his Boston Globe article, Thoreau continues to gaze “imperturbably out of those old daguerreotypes just as he did during the Gilded Age, during the giddy ’20s, during the Reagan orgy, the same mild hint of disapproval in his eyes.” Perhaps, as Kathryn Schulz implied, his words will be less seldom heeded in the overmediated millennial era, but as Southwick wrote, “sometimes, after the aimless whirling of the day, thoughts come in the dead of the night. . . . You do have choices.” No wonder, Southwick concluded, “he ranks as the ultimate subversive. No wonder we find him so hard to forget.”30