Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1817 and attended Harvard College from 1833 to 1837. A friend and protege of Ralph Waldo Emerson, he lived from 1845 to 1847 in a small house he built near Walden Pond, the experience behind Walden (1854). In 1846 he spent a night in jail for refusing to pay his poll tax in protest against slavery and the Mexican-American War, and in 1849 he published the essay now known as Civil Disobedience. He wrote against the Fugitive Slave Law, defended John Brown after the raid on Harpers Ferry and died of tuberculosis in 1862.

Thoreau's Civil Disobedience influenced Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., and his nature writing is often credited with anticipating ecology and the conservation movement. Admirers across the political spectrum, from libertarians to environmentalists and pacifists, claim him as a forerunner. Critics have called his stance on conscience a recipe for individuals placing themselves above democratic law, and some note that his defense of John Brown sits uneasily with the nonviolent reading of his work. Others regard his two years at Walden as less self-sufficient than his book suggests. Little noticed in his lifetime, he became one of the most widely read American writers.