About the Author

Thoreau's gravestone, an eight inch-high white marble monument identified only by the name, "Henry," faces east. Less than forty feet across the narrow asphalt walkway is set the tombstone for another Concord citizen, engraved simply, "Hawthorne." A stroll further down the path of the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery takes the literary devotee past the grave of Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, and, a little farther, to the New England pink granite boulder that marks the final resting place of "the great Sage of Concord," Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The Concord writers that rest together were members, in their lifetime, of one of the most remarkable communities in American literary history. While each of them contributed uniquely to its canon, both their social and literary lives intertwined, their activities, conflicts, and correspondence filling volumes in the lore of literary Americana.

Henry David Thoreau is best known today for two treatises: the first, on individualism and the sacred unity of nature, framed in his philosophical observations in "Walden"; the second, "Civil Disobedience," his ethical polemic defining "passive resistance" and its rationale, a work that influenced both Mahatma Gandhi's stand against the British in India and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s practice of non-violent demonstrations in the United States civil rights struggle.

A small man physically, and uncomely in appearance, Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, the son of a pencil maker. He received a classical education in a small academy and later graduated from Harvard University in 1837. He had tutored occasionally to help defray college costs, and he continued as a tutor and teacher on and off throughout his life. Upon returning to Concord from Cambridge, Thoreau joined the faculty of a local school, but horrified by the severity with which the children were disciplined, he resigned after only a brief tenure, and with his brother, John, opened a private academy, based on what they believed to be a more humane approach to instruction. Shortly afterward, the two of them took a canoe trip, resulting in Thoreau's first, though unprofitable, publication years later, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). Within two years, however, John succumbed to lock jaw. Devastated by the loss of his brother and best friend, Henry could not maintain the school, and the academy closed.

The departure from teaching was not especially significant for Thoreau, as he was fitted emotionally for no one profession in particular. In fact, his career was becoming the pursuit of life itself, his goal to live it fully from within, to articulate that experience in the "doing" of it, and to annotate it, if and when possible. That commentary, which he began in his journal while still at Harvard, consumed, in time, more than 3 million words, volumes that are studied today, along with his more familiar works, by students of Thoreau worldwide.

To pay his bills, Thoreau performed odd jobs. He lived for two brief spells in the Emerson household, covering his keep as a handyman and house sitter when the family was away. He did a little carpentry, assisted with his father's pencil business, surveyed property on public and private crews, and lectured from time to time. Thoreau was a familiar figure in and about the small village of Concord--familiar, if not always popular.

Thoreau's deep regard for, and faith in, the individual, set apart from citizenship to the state, caused him to challenge the easy patriotism of his neighbors and the jingoism of the federal government, angering a number of his contemporaries. On this and on other issues, he suffered heated exchanges from time to time, even with Emerson himself. He was committed to certain intuitive principles, what he called collectively the "moral sense" that he believed to be superior to the laws of political expedience and compromise. It was a philosophy that prompted a number of demonstrations, including his withholding both church taxes and state property taxes, a rebellion that landed him, for at least one night, in the local jail. His convictions regarding slavery and the responsibility of the individual to resist unjust laws prompted his outspoken attacks on the United States incursion into Mexico in 1848 and a speech on behalf of John Brown, even after his raid on Harper's Ferry. If this political and social activism set him at odds with his fellow Concordians, it must have seemed to some only an extension of eccentricities suggested earlier when Thoreau, with the help of Emerson, Bronson Alcott, and William Elery Channing, raised the walls of his little one-room cottage in late spring of 1845, just about two miles south of town on the north side of Walden Pond.

The focus of a personal experiment in intense living, removed from the conveniences of domestic life and reduced to only the necessities, Thoreau moved into his little cabin on July 4, 1845. He had built the cabin for $28.13, he recorded, less than he paid in annual rent for the room of his dormitory at Harvard. The education he sought at Walden was very different, however, from the scholarship of the Cambridge lecture hall. This instruction was to be gleaned from his field, day by day, as he sowed his beans, baked his bread loafs, and recorded his observations. He was no hermit, however, and Thoreau entertained guests who came to visit occasionally. He appeared in Concord, as those necessities required, sold some of his produce, and checked in with friends and his family. His sojourn at Walden Pond lasted only two years, and he left the cabin to a farmer who used at least the roof as a cover for his pig pen. What he bequeathed to the world, on the other hand, is one of the most insightful studies of nature and the individual's place within it.

Like his brother John and sister Elizabeth, Henry died early in life, too young at the age of 44, from the ravages of tuberculosis. He is celebrated worldwide for his interpretation of the simplicity of nature and the advocation of the notion of the citizenship of all people within a natural ecology; for his unswerving commitment to a universal moral truth; and for his courageous stands on social and human rights issues and the abolition of slavery. In tribute to his young protégé in the years following Thoreau's death, Emerson and a visitor laid a small cairn of stones near the original cabin site at Walden. Today, the mound has grown with autographed rocks of every shape and size piled high, and the simplicity of his tiny tombstone is belied daily by the profusion of flowers and mementos arranged on and around his grave by devotees from around the world.