The Essays of Henry David Thoreau

by Henry David Thoreau

Collected here are nineteen essays by Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau was one of America's best known and most influential writers. His work has helped shape the American Discourse and had a lasting effect on the environmental movement in America. Included here are The Service, A Walk to Wachusett, Paradise (to be) Regained, The Landlord, Herald of Freedom, Wendell Phillips Before the Concord Lyceum, Reform and the Reformers, Thomas Carlyle and His Works, Civil Disobedience, Slavery in Massachusetts, A Plea for Captain John Brown, Remarks After the Hanging of John Brown, The Last Days of John Brown, Walking, Autumnal Tints, Wild The History of the Apple Tree, Life Without Principle, Night and Moonlight, and The Highland Light.

472 pages, Paperback

Published September 16, 2025

About the author

Henry David Thoreau (born David Henry Thoreau) was an American author, naturalist, transcendentalist, tax resister, development critic, philosopher, and abolitionist who is best known for Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay, Civil Disobedience, an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state.

Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry total over 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions were his writings on natural history and philosophy, where he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern day environmentalism.

In 1817, Henry David Thoreau was born in Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard University in 1837, taught briefly, then turned to writing and lecturing. Becoming a Transcendentalist and good friend of Emerson, Thoreau lived the life of simplicity he advocated in his writings. His two-year experience in a hut in Walden, on land owned by Emerson, resulted in the classic, Walden: Life in the Woods (1854). During his sojourn there, Thoreau refused to pay a poll tax in protest of slavery and the Mexican war, for which he was jailed overnight. His activist convictions were expressed in the groundbreaking On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (1849). In a diary he noted his disapproval of attempts to convert the Algonquins "from their own superstitions to new ones." In a journal he noted dryly that it is appropriate for a church to be the ugliest building in a village, "because it is the one in which human nature stoops to the lowest and is the most disgraced." (Cited by James A. Haught in 2000 Years of Disbelief.) When Parker Pillsbury sought to talk about religion with Thoreau as he was dying from tuberculosis, Thoreau replied: "One world at a time."

Thoreau's philosophy of nonviolent resistance influenced the political thoughts and actions of such later figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. D. 1862.

More: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/tho...

http://thoreau.eserver.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Da...

http://transcendentalism-legacy.tamu....

http://www.biography.com/people/henry...

Reviews

[Julia]

Boy, was that a long introduction, so long my eyes began to glaze over and I couldn't wait to get into the actual essays. Unfortunately, I made it only as far as page 45, finding the writing a little too philosophical, a little too abstract, a little too poetic, and a little too inaccessible. I might have stuck it out if it had been assigned reading but, for pleasure reading, maintaining focus was just too much work.

[Analise Irakoze]

The best curated book of essays I’ve ever read. The introduction was so beautifully written I didn’t want it to end, and it gave me such an intentional and awe-filled perspective as I read Thoreau’s writings. A must read for every lover of naturalist writing.