1. Henry David Thoreau 1817-1862

2.  Hawthorne said that Thoreau was “tedious, tiresome and intolerable.” But, he also added “he has great qualities of intellect and character.”  “He seemed born for great enterprise and for command,” Emerson said years later at Thoreau’s funeral, “and I so much regret the loss of his rare powers of action, that I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had not ambition. Wanting this, instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of the Huckleberry party.”

3. HHe was born David Henry Thoreau in Concord, Massachussetts, in 1817. HHis father was a pencil maker; his mother took in boarders, one of them being Emerson’s sister. TThoreau’s attachment to Concord was established early in his life as he would wander the woods with his fishing pole.

4.  He attended Harvard in 1833 and graduated in the middle of his class.  At Harvard he became familiar with English literature and with German philosophers who provided much of the underpinnings of Transcendentalism.  He was independent and eccentric.

5.  Thoreau would eventually depart for Walden Pond where Emerson had offered him the use of some land.  “The experiment at Walden Pond was an attempt to rediscover the grandeur and heroism inherent in a simple life led close to Nature” (205).  “I wish to meet the facts of life,” he wrote in his journal, “the vital facts, which are the phenomenon or actuality the gods meant to show us…and so I came down here.”

6. Walden  Again and again in Walden, Thoreau would return to images drawn from Greek and Latin epics, “asserting the essential brotherhood between the adventurers of the mythic past and the truth-seeking voyager of the present” (205).

7.  “The mass of men,” as one of his most famous sentences in Walden puts it, “lead lives of quiet desperation.”  “When he look toward town, Thoreau saw his prosperous fellow citizens so caught up in the material pursuits of making a living that they had become one- dimensional” (206).

8.  Walden is considered one of the greatest works ever produced in America. It successfully blends style and content; his style is simple- at least on the surface.  “For Thoreau, as for Emerson and the Romantics who preceded them, Nature itself was a form of language; behind its outward appearance, Nature contained spiritual reality. Nature spoke to us, if we could understand the message about those ‘vital facts’ which ‘the gods meant to show us’” (206).

9.  While at Walden, as a protest against the Mexican War (seen as an attempt to extend American slave owning territory), Thoreau refused to pay his poll tax and spent a night in jail until someone paid it for him.  He was vocally and radically opposed to slavery.

10.  Thoreau remained at Walden for a little over two years. In 1847, he moved in with Emerson and did odds jobs to help pay his room and board.  He eventually moved to his father’s house in Concord, where he remained for the rest of his life. He became a kind of Concord record keeper, tracking rainfall, snowfall, the first days of frost and the first days of spring.  He died of tuberculosis in 1862.

11.  Sam staple told Emerson that he, “never saw a man dying with so much pleasure and peace.”  “Henry, have you made your peace with God?” his aunt is said to have asked him toward the end. “Why Aunt,” he replied, “I didn’t know we ever quarreled.”