Henry David Thoreau

American essayist, poet, philosopher and naturalist (Henry David Thoreau, 1817–1862), born in Concord, Massachusetts, a Harvard graduate disillusioned with conventional professional careers, who worked for several years as a tutor, surveyor and in the family pencil factory, and who was part of the Concord circle of transcendentalists around Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose disciple, close friend and, for a time, employee as gardener and general handyman he was. The most famous episode of his life was his voluntary retreat of just over two years (1845–1847) in a small cabin he built himself beside Walden Pond, on land owned by Emerson, an experiment in simple, self-sufficient living deliberately pared down to essentials that he documented in Walden (1854), his masterwork: this was not a romantic flight from civilisation but a deliberate philosophical experiment to discover, in his own words, how 'to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life', stripping existence of social conventions and superfluous material possessions to examine its genuine core. During his time at Walden, Thoreau spent a night in jail for refusing to pay a tax that funded the war with Mexico and the maintenance of slavery, an episode that led him to write his second most influential text, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (1849), in which he articulated for the first time in systematic form the principle that a citizen has a moral obligation to disobey unjust laws, even accepting legal punishment for it as a form of peaceful protest — an idea that would go on to exert a direct, later acknowledged influence on Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. A meticulous naturalist, his journals of botanical and ecological observation of Concord are today regarded as precursors of the conservation movement and modern scientific ecology, and his body of work as a whole has made Thoreau a fundamental reference point for both environmentalist thought and the philosophy of civil disobedience and non-violent resistance.

14 works

• A Plea for Captain John Brown
• A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
• Canoeing in the wilderness
• Cape Cod
• Excursions
• Excursions, and Poems
• Familiar Letters
• Journal 01, 1837-1846
• Journal 02, 1850-September 15, 1851
• On the Duty of Civil Disobedience
• Poems of Nature
• The Maine Woods
• Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience
• Walking