Henry David Thoreau: Thinking Disobediently

by Lawrence Buell

"When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond..."

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was a leading figure in the American Transcendentalist movement and the era of U. S. literary emergence, an intellectual with worldwide influence as essayist, social thinker, naturalist-environmentalist, and sage. Thoreau's Walden , an autobiographical narrative of his two-year sojourn in a self-built lakeside cabin, is one of the most widely studied works of American literature. It has generated scores of literary imitations and thousands of neo-Walden experiments in back-to-basics living, both rural and urban. Thoreau's great essay, "Civil Disobedience," is a classic of American political activism and a model for nonviolent reform movements around the world. Thoreau also stands as an icon of modern American environmentalism, the father of American nature writing, a forerunner of modern ecology, and a harbinger of freelance spirituality combining the wisdom of west and east.

Thoreau is also a controversial figure. From his day to ours, he has provoked sharply opposite reactions ranging from reverence to dismissal. Scholars have regularly offered conflicting assessments of the significance of his work, the evolution of his thought, even the facts of his life. Some disagreements are in the eye of the beholder, but many follow from challenges posed by his own cross-grained idiosyncrasies. He was an advocate for individual self-sufficiency who never broke away from home, a self-professed mystic now also acclaimed as a pioneer natural and applied scientist, and a seminal theorist of nonviolent protest who defended the most notorious guerrilla fighter of his day. All told, he remains a rather enigmatic figure both despite and because we know so much about him, beginning with the two-million-word journal he kept throughout his adult life. The esteemed Thoreau scholar Lawrence Buell gives due consideration to all these aspects of Thoreau's art and thought, framing
key issues and complexities in historical and literary context.

Genres: Philosophy, Biography, Nonfiction, History

152 pages, Hardcover

Published October 3, 2023

Reviews

[Mark Hawthorne]

In “Henry David Thoreau: Thinking Disobediently,” Lawrence Buell draws mostly from Thoreau’s writing—in particular his book “Walden,” his essay “Civil Disobedience,” and his 47-volume, 2-million-word Journal—to explore the many sides of Thoreau, giving readers not so much a biography as a series of studies on key aspects of his work and philosophy.

His life as a writer, his accomplishments as an amateur scientist, his attitude regarding passive resistance, and his friendship with Emerson all get ample treatment, as does Thoreau’s famous role as a proto-minimalist. In examining Thoreau’s fondness for thrift and downscaling, for example, Dr. Buell observes how neatly this viewpoint aligned with his inclination toward political protest. “A person with few material possessions and social entanglements is best positioned to act on conscience,” he writes. “Here too, then, a nonmaterialistic voluntary simplicity is seen as key to unlocking one’s worthier impulses.”

I found the chapter on Thoreau’s spirituality to be especially thought-provoking. As a Transcendentalist, he had a worldview that was perhaps more open-minded than those of his nineteenth-century Western contemporaries, and he quit his local Unitarian church as a young man. “Even as he extricated himself from the residues of conventional theism,” Dr. Buell writes, “he continued to be drawn by the sense of an accessible higher power, whether in nature or in the inner illuminations of one’s spirt; and by the force of those experiences he believed himself to have felt.”

My one criticism—and the reason I’m giving this book four stars rather than five—is the author’s penchant for using uncommon words. Dr. Buell is clearly brilliant, but he seems to have forgotten that not every reader is going to have the vocabulary of an English professor, and it makes the text a bit more difficult to enjoy. I consider myself to be reasonably intelligent, yet it seemed that every other page offered a word I had to look up. Ironically, Dr. Buell chides his subject for the same habit, pointing out that Thoreau believed that learning to write was the main benefit of his Harvard education but that he also relied too much on his verbal skills. He writes: “At first that training proved as much impediment as impetus, however. It instilled a stiffly formal style and an overreliance on arcane erudition. … Only after much trial-and-error experiment did he manage to convert his youthful owlish pedantry into a more pungent idiom.”

“Henry David Thoreau: Thinking Disobediently” is fascinating and a must-read for any Thoreauvian. Just keep a good dictionary handy.

[Rick]

While everyone seems to have an opinion about who Henry David Thoreau was, Lawrence Buell makes sure that we can understand that he may have been "all of the above" so to speak. He was a political activist, a natural scientist, a writer, a philosopher, a lecturer, a pencil maker, a tiny house builder, and many more. The big issue seems to be whether Thoreau at some point gave up the life of a transcendentalist seeker and resolved to be student of nature in his later days. Perhaps that wasn't the case. He maintained his search for higher truths throughout his life, no matter what project he had going at any particular time.

[Dan Cassino]

Best read as an extended introduction to “Walden” and “Civil Disobedience,” Buell has put together an impressive series of short essays putting those works into context with Thoreau’s other work, as well as his social and political surroundings. The point seems to be that we tend to caricature Thoreau, turning him into a mystic or an environmentalist or a crank or a head in the clouds idealist, and it’s not that he can’t be read as any of them, but rather that he can be read as any of them, that he contradicted himself, that he evolved, that he was, for most of his life, pretty aimless. There are some through lines, and Buell makes a strong case for Thoreau the natural scientist, but he’s a mass of contradiction.
Also, Buell apparently read all 15+ volumes of Thoreau’s Journal carefully (he offers some hints here about how to get through that mind numbing text), so that we don’t have to, and he deserves our appreciation for that if nothing else.

[William Dreyer]

This book was good as a history of Thoreau’s participation in the Transcendentalist movement and of his interactions with its members. Unfortunately, Buell’s much greater knowledge of Emerson as compared to Thoreau and others shines through even in this title (dedicated to Thoreau, and his incredibly academic writing makes the work hard to swallow. He puts forward incredible insight and information, but unfortunately he has written it in the most overtly academic, unentertaining way.

[Marianne Meyers]

You know, this was dry. Doctoral dissertation dry. Removed dry. I've read many, many books about Thoreau as well as all of his writings, so I'm a captive audience, but I come away with nothing new. I applaud and appreciate the author's research and recognize his scholarship but not the book for me.

[Lewis Ward]

Terse with many insightful passages that reveal Thoreau's thinking through time.

[Ronnie]

I will write later.