Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau grew up in Concord, Massachusetts, son of a struggling pencil maker and Cynthia Dunbar, whose own father had led Harvard's first recorded student protest, over bad butter, in 1766. Tuberculosis marked the family early: two of his three siblings eventually died of it, and Thoreau caught the disease himself at eighteen, in 1835. He went to Harvard anyway, refused to pay the five-dollar fee for a diploma, and came home to teach at the town school. Ordered to cane a pupil for discipline, he did it, then resigned within weeks in disgust at himself. He and his brother John ran a school of their own instead, until John died of lockjaw from a shaving cut in 1842.

He moved into a cabin on Emerson's land at Walden Pond on July 4, 1845, and stayed two years, two months and two days, an experiment in what a life actually costs when you strip it down. Walden, the book he built from it, sold poorly at first. A year earlier, a night in the Concord jail for refusing to pay a poll tax that funded the Mexican-American War and slavery had produced the essay now called Civil Disobedience, which argues that a single person's conscience outranks a bad law. In 1859 he stood before a hostile Concord crowd and defended John Brown as a hero days after Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, before almost anyone else dared to. He earned his actual living making pencils in his father's shop.

The man who preached self-reliance did his laundry at his mother's house and ate dinner there most weeks during his two years at the pond, the cabin sat on land Emerson owned, a mile and a half from town, not deep wilderness. Concord's opinion of him hardened for a better reason in April 1844: he and a friend, cooking a chowder of fish they'd just caught, let the fire get away from them and burned some 300 acres of the town's own woodland. Neighbors who had already found him prickly now called him "woods burner" for years afterward, and he never really apologized in print, writing instead about watching the flames with something close to admiration. The naturalist's own carelessness had scorched the nature he claimed to speak for.

He died of tuberculosis in Concord on May 6, 1862, having spent his last conscious months revising manuscripts and, asked if he had made peace with God, answering that he did not know they had ever quarreled. His obituary drew little notice. What changed his standing was a set of readers he never met: Mohandas Gandhi read Civil Disobedience in a South African jail and called its logic unanswerable, and Martin Luther King Jr. found it at Morehouse College and later called it transformative to how he understood resistance. Thoreau went from a minor Concord naturalist to one of the most reprinted political essayists in the English language, still taught, still occasionally accused of the hypocrisy his neighbors saw first.

Henry David Thoreau's life against the full span of the corpus.

• A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers book
  Self-published — fewer than 300 of 1,000 copies sold in his lifetime 1849
• Resistance to Civil Government article
  Now known as Civil Disobedience — grew out of one night in the Concord jail 1849
• Walden, or Life in the Woods book
  Compressed two years at the pond into one narrated year 1854
• A Plea for Captain John Brown speech
  Delivered in Concord days after Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry 1859
• The Maine Woods book
  Assembled from his journals and published two years after his death 1864

• July 12, 1817 aged 0 Born in Concord, Massachusetts
• 1837 aged ~20 Graduates from Harvard and refuses to pay for his diploma He called it a piece of sheepskin not worth the fee.
• 1842 aged ~25 His brother John dies of lockjaw from a shaving cut The school the brothers ran together closed with him.
• April 1844 aged 26 Accidentally burns roughly 300 acres of Walden Woods Cooking a fish chowder with his friend Edward Hoar near Fair Haven Bay.
• July 4, 1845 aged 27 Moves into a cabin at Walden Pond, on land owned by Emerson
• July 24, 1846 aged 29 Spends a night in the Concord jail for refusing the poll tax
• 1849 aged ~32 Publishes the essay later titled Civil Disobedience
• October 30, 1859 aged 42 Delivers A Plea for Captain John Brown in Concord
• May 6, 1862 aged 44 Dies of tuberculosis in Concord

• Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803–1882
  Essayist and philosopher who led the Transcendentalist movement and shaped American intellectual thought. mentor
• Nathaniel Hawthorne 1804–1864
  Novelist whose The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables explored Puritan guilt and sin. neighbor and friend
• John Brown 1800–1859
  Militant abolitionist whose raid on Harpers Ferry sharpened sectional conflict preceding the Civil War. defended in a speech
• Martin Luther King Jr. 1929–1968
  Baptist minister and civil rights leader whose nonviolent activism ended legal segregation in America. influenced
• William Lloyd Garrison 1805–1879
  Editor of The Liberator and founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society. fellow abolitionist voice