Henry David Thoreau: A Life

by Laura Dassow Walls

“Walden. Yesterday I came here to live.” That entry from the journal of Henry David Thoreau, and the intellectual journey it began, would by themselves be enough to place Thoreau in the American pantheon. His attempt to “live deliberately” in a small woods at the edge of his hometown of Concord has been a touchstone for individualists and seekers since the publication of Walden in 1854.
 
But there was much more to Thoreau than his brief experiment in living at Walden Pond. A member of the vibrant intellectual circle centered on his neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson, he was also an ardent naturalist, a manual laborer and inventor, a radical political activist, and more. Many books have taken up various aspects of Thoreau’s character and achievements, but, as Laura Dassow Walls writes, “Thoreau has never been captured between covers; he was too quixotic, mischievous, many-sided.” Two hundred years after his birth, and two generations after the last full-scale biography, Walls restores Henry David Thoreau to us in all his profound, inspiring complexity.
 
Walls traces the full arc of Thoreau’s life, from his early days in the intellectual hothouse of Concord, when the American experiment still felt fresh and precarious, and “America was a family affair, earned by one generation and about to pass to the next.” By the time he died in 1862, at only forty-four years of age, Thoreau had witnessed the transformation of his world from a community of farmers and artisans into a bustling, interconnected commercial nation. What did that portend for the contemplative individual and abundant, wild nature that Thoreau celebrated?
 
Drawing on Thoreau’s copious writings, published and unpublished, Walls presents a Thoreau vigorously alive in all his quirks and the young man shattered by the sudden death of his brother; the ambitious Harvard College student; the ecstatic visionary who closed Walden with an account of the regenerative power of the Cosmos. We meet the man whose belief in human freedom and the value of labor made him an uncompromising abolitionist; the solitary walker who found society in nature, but also found his own nature in the society of which he was a deeply interwoven part. And, running through it all, Thoreau the passionate naturalist, who, long before the age of environmentalism, saw tragedy for future generations in the human heedlessness around him.
 
“The Thoreau I sought was not in any book, so I wrote this one,” says Walls. The result is a Thoreau unlike any seen since he walked the streets of Concord, a Thoreau for our time and all time.
 

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, History, Philosophy, Biography Memoir, Nature, American History

640 pages, Hardcover

First published July 7, 2017

Reviews

[Ken · Rating 5 out of 5]

The thing about biography is, if it's well-written, you feel as if you've lost a friend at the end. And why not? After keeping the man company for 500 pages, from youth to bitter end, he begins to seep into your pores a bit. You sweat the subject, begin to feel indignant when he does, elated when he is, worried about this thing there's never enough of -- time.

I knew a thing or two about H. D. Thoreau going in, mostly by dint of Walden, a book I've read straight through once and dabbled in multiple times. I also finished annotated selections from his Journals a few years back. In that case, I used it as a now-and-then read over the course of a great expanse of time. As it was written, then.

Still, Walls' well-written story contained many, many facts and insights, from little ones like his real name (David Henry Thoreau) to big ones like his championing of a man initially reviled after his failed raid on Harper's Ferry (John Brown). The biography also dispels the popular stereotype of Thoreau as stolid curmudgeon, stick-in-the-Concord-mud, and what-not. She humanizes the man, makes him more nuanced and humorous and warm.

Did you know that more people in Thoreau's Concord never married than did? Henry was just another one. He married (but of course!) woods and pond, beach and sea. And his last words ("Moose, Indian") are probably apocryphal and certainly, even if uttered, not his last (they were, in fact, "Now comes good sailing.").

Most amazing is how seamlessly Walls weaves quotes from Thoreau's books and journals and lectures (not to mention quotes from the books and journals and lectures of his contemporaries), all while brushing things up with her own sparkling and at times poetic prose.

Revolutionary? Yeah, kind of. Civil Disobedience was just the start. As he aged, Thoreau was more and more about calling the federal government out when it violated the very rights it was supposed to represent via the Constitution and the Declaration. Scientist? In a big way. This guy walked everywhere. Everywhere. And every day. Noticing and picking up all manner of specimens, informed as he was by constant readings, including Darwin's Origin of Species. Businessman? Of the family business, yes, as pencil makers extraordinaire, not to mention, thanks to his own skills, as a well-respected surveyor.

Like all good biographies, this is not only the history of a man but a history of his times. You'll learn not a little about 19th-century New England, Indians, the anti-slavery movement (the Thoreau house had Underground Railroad credentials), biology, and the approaching Civil War. There's also that perennial subject, the weather. At one point, the winter grows so cold (20 below zero F) that the ground cracks open with booming sounds. In our fossil-fuel heated world today, Massachusetts will never see the likes of this again.

In short, by the end of his days, and after mixing with Emerson and Alcott and Hawthorne and even, one day, Walt Whitman, Thoreau was a legend and a symbol in his hometown. As for his influence, it would only grow and never subside, much like the waves made when you toss a stone into Walden Pond today.

Just think of the shorelines of that pond as the world. Thoreau is Everyman and his influence knows no borders.

[Diane S ☔ · Rating 5 out of 5]

For the last several months I have spent time in Thoreau's world. His and the other Concord notables. After finishing Walden, I had an impression of this man, as one who thought himself above others, high minded and a bit of a snob. I did, however, think highly of his love for nature, and his non materialism, minimalist stance on life. After reading this biography of him, my feelings have completely changed, to one of deep admiration. The author does a fantastic job of taking us through this man's life, his beliefs, his journeys, his dependability, and his unquenchable thirst for knowledge. His love of nature, justice, family and friends. I immensely enjoyed the time we spent together.

If nothing else it shows one should not judge a person from one book alone.

[Stefania Dzhanamova · Rating 5 out of 5]

Henry David Thoreau was the last male descendant of a French ancestor who came to the United States from the Isle of Guernsey. He was born in Concord, Massachusetts, on the 12th of July, 1817 and graduated from Harvard College in 1837 without any literary distinction. He seldom thanked colleges for their service to him. After leaving the University, he joined his brother in teaching a private school, which he soon renounced. His father was a manufacturer of lead-pencils, and Henry applied himself for a time to this craft, believing he could make a better pencil than was then in use. After completing his experiments, he exhibited his work to chemists and artists in Boston, and having obtained their certificates to its excellence, returned home contented. His friends congratulated him that he had now opened his way to fortune. But he replied that he should never make another pencil. “Why should I? I would not do again what I have done once.” He resumed his endless walks and miscellaneous studies, making every day some new acquaintance with Nature; yet he never spoke of zoology or botany because he was not interested in technical and textual science.
At this time, he was a strong, healthy youth, fresh from college. All his friends were on the lookout for lucrative professions, so it required a rare decision to refuse all the accustomed paths and keep his solitary freedom at the cost of letting down the expectations of his family and friends. But Thoreau never faltered. He'd been born a dissident. He refused to give up his large ambition of knowledge and action for any narrow craft or profession, choosing a much more comprehensive calling — the art of living well. Never idle or self-indulgent, he preferred, when he wanted money, earning it by doing manual labor agreeable to him: building a boat or a fence, planting, surveying or other short work. With his hardy habits and few wants, his skill in wood-craft, and his powerful arithmetic, he was very competent to live in any part of the world. It would cost him less to supply his wants than another.
He was bred to no profession; he never married; he lived alone; he never went to church; he never voted; he refused to pay a tax to the State; he ate no flesh; he drank no wine; he never knew the use of tobacco; and though a naturalist, he used neither traps nor guns. He chose to be "the bachelor of thought and Nature." He knew how to be poor without the least hint of squalor or inelegance. He had no temptations to fight against — no appetites, no passions, no taste for elegant trifles. He disliked fine houses, dresses, the manners and talk of highly cultivated people. He much preferred a good Indian, and considered these refinements as impediments to conversation, wishing to meet his companion on the simplest terms. He declined invitations to dinner parties. “They make their pride,” he said, “in making their dinner cost much; I make my pride in making my dinner cost little.” When asked at table what dish he preferred, he answered, “The nearest.”
Solitary and ascetic as he was, he threw himself heartily into the company of young people whom he loved, and whom he delighted to entertain with the endless anecdotes of his experiences by field and river: and he was always ready to lead a huckleberry-party or a search for chestnuts or grapes.
He always spoke the truth. It interested all bystanders to know what Henry would say; and he did not disappoint expectation, but used an original judgment on each occasion. In 1845 he built himself a small house on the shores of Walden Pond, and lived there two years alone, a life of labor and study. This action was quite fit for him. As soon as he had exhausted the advantages of that solitude, however, he abandoned it. In 1847, not approving some uses to which the public expenditure was applied, he refused to pay his town tax, and was put in jail. A friend paid the tax for him, and he was released. No opposition or ridicule left any impression on him. He coldly and fully stated his opinion without affecting to believe that it was the opinion of the company. It was of no consequence if every one present held the opposite opinion.
Despite standing for abolition of slavery, abolition of tariffs, almost for abolition of government, he found himself not only unrepresented in actual politics, but almost equally opposed to every class of reformers. Yet he paid the tribute of his uniform respect to the Anti-Slavery party. One man he honored with exceptional regard — Captain John Brown. He sent notices to most houses in Concord that he would speak in a public hall on the character of John Brown, and invited all people to come. The Republican Committee, the Abolitionist Committee, sent him word that it was premature and not advisable. He replied, “I did not send to you for advice, but to announce that I am to speak.” The hall was filled at an early hour by people of all parties, and his earnest eulogy of the hero was heard by all respectfully, by many with a sympathy that surprised themselves.
Thoreau was of short stature, firmly built, with serious blue eyes, his face covered in the late years with a beard. His senses were acute, his frame hardy, his hands strong and skilful in the use of tools. He posessed a wonderful fitness of body and mind. He could find his path in the woods at night, he said, better by his feet than his eyes. He could estimate the measure of a tree very well by his eye; he could estimate the weight of a calf or a pig, like a dealer. He was a good swimmer, runner, and boatman. He said he wanted every stride his legs made. The length of his walk made the length of his writing. If shut up in the house he did not write at all.
Thoreau dedicated himself with such entire love to the fields, hills and waters of his native town, that he made them known and interesting to all reading Americans, and to people overseas. The river on whose banks he was born and died he knew from its springs to its confluence with the Merrimack. He had made summer and winter observations on it for many years, and at every hour of the day and night. He was patient. He knew how to sit immovable until the bird, the reptile, the fish should resume its habits, or, moved by curiosity, come to him and watch him.
Thoreau was sincerity itself. He was a truth-speaker, capable of the most deep and strict conversation; he was a friend who knew not only the secret of friendship, but was admired by those few persons who resorted to him as their confessor and knew the value of his mind and great heart. He thought that without religion or devotion of some kind nothing great was ever accomplished. He devoted himself to Nature.

This book is a good overview of the life and, more importantly, character of the odd man of Concord. It is well-written and compelling. Recommendable.

[Bob Brinkmeyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most readers know Thoreau through Walden, though I wonder if it is still taught in American schools much anymore. It’s a pity if it’s not, particularly given its relevance to the ongoing destruction of the natural world and the climate crisis that will probably determine our future if we don’t do ourselves in in some other way. In any case, Thoreau’s importance as an environmental/political thinker extends far beyond Walden (great as that book is), as Laura Walls's superb biography makes so abundantly clear. Walls is Thoreau’s perfect biographer, a brilliant scholar deeply knowledgeable of not only Thoreau’s life and work but also the world in which he lived, including the incredible array of intellectuals who were either neighbors of Thoreau in Concord or correspondents with whom he also occasionally visited—that list, to name only several, includes Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathanial Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass, and Bronson Alcott. Walls is also thoroughly grounded in New England history and its natural world, which were both crucial to Thoreau and are crucial to understanding him.

Though not downplaying the events of Thoreau’s life (I particularly liked Walls’s discussion of his tumultuous undergraduate education at Harvard where the rebellious youth bumped heads with all sorts of strict and eccentric professors), Walls’s biography focuses primarily on Thoreau’s intellectual development, the complex weave of thoughts and influences that coalesced into Walden and his other major works, including A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, and “Civil Disobedience.” Walls discusses all of these works sensitively and insightfully, striking just the right balance between Thoreau’s life and work—a balance that is often askew, one way or the other, in many literary biographies.

Throughout his career Thoreau remained integrally grounded in the natural world, particularly the world of Concord and its outlying countryside. While he loved to travel—and did when he could—he also felt that the most important traveling was that closer to home, involving getting to know intimately and deeply the area where a person lived. “It takes a man of genius to travel his own country—in his native village,” Thoreau once wrote. He kept copious and detailed records of what he saw on his walks, noting the days certain flowers opened, the first dates of frost, the depths of rivers and streams, and just about everything else that he came across. He had the exacting eye of the scientist and indeed he was skilled as a surveyor and as an engineer of small machinery (he helped in his family’s pencil factory, making repairs on the machines and experimenting with new ways to improve the pencils, including creating new formulas for the graphite and designing innovative ways of pencil production).

Particularly later in life, the world of nature for Thoreau was also the world of politics. As Wall observes, Thoreau believed “that attention to the natural environment confronted the root of all political evil.” The freedom and sanctity that he found in the natural world, the ideal for which he believed everyone should strive, was being undermined if not destroyed by rapacious commerce and hypocritical politics that he saw pervading the nation, particularly with regards to slavery, both its existence within the nation and the widespread support it received in the North. He was particularly enraged with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act and his own state’s enforcement of it by seizing escaped slaves and sending them back to the South. Thoreau was a vigorous anti-slavery advocate in times when that was often dangerous, not only voicing his positions but also helping Blacks making their way along the underground railroad. After the raid at Harper’s Ferry and the capture and subsequent conviction of John Brown, Thoreau passionately defended Brown and went so far as to help one of his fugitive raiders escape to Canada.

There’s so much wisdom in this book, from both Thoreau and Walls, too much to go into in a brief review. That said, I want to end with an extraordinarily moving passage from Thoreau on death and dying. One autumn, struck by the splendor of the changing leaves, Thoreau observed: “How beautifully they go to their graves—how gently lay themselves down--& turn to mould.” “They teach us how to die,” he adds. “One wonders if the time will ever come when men . . . will lie down as gracefully and as ripe—[and] with such an Indian-summer serenity will shed their bodies, as they do their hair and nails.”

[Sher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Will be one of my top 10 reads for 2019. A detailed account of all Thoreau's major works and a cultural history of Concord during the 19th C. All the big theme of 19th C American cultural life are covered in this book with the big events too such as the John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, The Civil War, slavery, Native American views, Darwin, and the coming ravages of industrialization and capitalism. In addition Thoreau's complex personality and a tracing of his friendships with Emerson, Channing, and others beautifully captures a man who is known for solitude, but who in fact loved friendship, family, and companionship. Most of his walks were taken with a companion. Even his famous amazingly long journal was his companion. A great stepping off point from reading _Walden_, and a biography that will lead me many more places. Beautifully written and well researched- just a treasure- like Thoreau himself.

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Those who admire Thoreau and his intimacy with nature around Concord and New England may have a sense of a legendary man equal to it, one who walked around in it confident it held few mysteries for him. The strength of Walls's portrait of Thoreau is that she writes him as a man who knew some things about how water flows and about birds, who understood the leaf and the way of squirrels, but who was still humbled by the natural world. Her book is the biography of a rather unaffected man who spent his whole life observing the details of the surroundings he inhabited, mostly around Concord, his home, but he also knew Maine and Cape Cod well and even made a trip as far as Minnesota near the end of his life. What impressed me is she allows him to be a citizen of Concord like any other, a man who worked at making pencils or surveying land or helping neighbors, even as he was always studying berries or ducks.

She says she wrote the biography because the life she sought, that of Thoreau the writer, was not in any book. So she wrote this life. It does emphasize his writing. She says Thoreau wanted to be taken seriously as a writer, to be admired for his work in the same ways Emerson was admired. She describes how hard he worked at it, publishing 2 books and many essays in his lifetime. I'd not known before how much he wrote for magazines or how many lectures he wrote to give before gatherings in the region. I'd not understood before how intensely he wanted to be known for his poetry and how deeply disappointed he was when he wasn't. His successes were in the book Walden and in his essays. And the Journal which became famous after his death.

This biography goes with others I have to help form a more whole picture of the man. I doubt it completes him. It is a comprehensive look at Thoreau the writer. The earlier biographer I most admire, Robert D. Richardson, wrote such a lengthy and glowing blurb for Walls's book that anyone reading it has to acknowledge that she does justice to her subject.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am usually not too keen about reading biographies, especially when, in the midst of a growing admiration, must witness the death of their subjects in the last chapter. So it was with Laura Dassow Walls's Henry David Thoreau: A Life.

Thoreau has always been one of my heroes. He is probably my favorite American and one of my favorite American writers. In his short life of 44 years, he anticipated many of the good things that were to follow, such as the National Park System, whose creation was influenced by naturalist John Muir, who in turn idolized Thoreau as a source of the idea.

For it was Thoreau who thought there should be areas known as "commons" where hunting was not allowed and where nature is allowed to hold full sway. Even in his lifetime, he saw the area around Walden Pond deforested.

I loved Ms Walls's biography, which concentrated on Thoreau's writings and his journeys -- never far from home, but with large repercussions in the years that came after his death in 1862. Even at the end of his life, he became a follower and helper of John Brown, and a devoted reader of the work of Charles Darwin.

Now I have to read more of Thoreau's own words. That's what a good biography should do, send you back to the original.

[David Guy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best biographies I’ve ever read. Right at the moment I can’t think of a better one. And it comes at an ideal moment for me.

The official occasion is the bicentennial of Thoreau’s birth, in 1817. There is a whole wave of writing coming out about him now. Thoreau’s life speaks to me because I’ve retired from my job at the university, and have a new opportunity to live my life deliberately, as he advocated (though I’ve tried always to do that). It also—rather unexpectedly—spoke to me about our political moment, and showed a side of Thoreau I hadn’t seen before.

In 1850, when he was at work on the book that would eventually become Walden—one of the most optimistic and essentially moral works in all of our literature—the Fugitive Slave Law was passed, saying that any fugitive slave in the country had to be returned to his owners, whether he was in a slave state or free. People who refused to assist in returning the slaves were themselves breaking the law. Many people in Massachusetts were infuriated by this law, and by the fact that their own Senator, Daniel Webster, had voted for it. Thoreau’s family, his mother and sisters, were heavily involved in the abolitionist movement, and continued to be, essentially becoming criminals. Thoreau assisted them and fulminated in rage against the law in page after page of his journal. Walden was finally published in the midst of this cloud, and at this tumultuous time in our history.

One of the things I most appreciate about Walls’ book is the way it takes us into this past time. It gave me a real feeling for what it was to live in a country where Thoreau could say that “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” but where a railroad ran right past Walden Pond, and trains interrupted the calm multiple times per day. It was a world where people made do with what they had, and got along on amounts of money that now seem tiny. Thoreau got the lumber for his Walden Pond house from someone else’s, and his house was eventually moved and the lumber used for another project. He lived for two years in a house that was roughly the size of the room I’m working in (10’ x 15’). There was no privy.

His own family was not wealthy by any means—Henry had to be a scholarship boy at Harvard—but his father was a successful businessman; a relative had discovered a graphite mine and staked a claim to it, and John Thoreau started a pencil factory and ran it all his life. Henry often worked there and inherited the business when his father died. The pencil was an important instrument in Thoreau’s career, freeing him from ink wells and enabling him to take notes out in the field, on his long walks. Among other projects as a young man he perfected the design of the modern pencil.

Walls’ book is not really revisionist, but every biography paints a different portrait of its subject, and she has a different take on Thoreau than any I had previously read. She doesn’t see him as the grouchy curmudgeon that others have portrayed; he was a sociable and curious man who talked to people all the time, all his life, and had many close friends. He was not as outgoing as his brother John, and was slightly weirder, more the solitary studious type. When John suddenly died of tetanus at the age of 26, having nicked a finger with a razor, Henry was devastated, seemed to become more introverted and to go deeper. It wasn’t quite like William Blake claiming that after his brother died he was in constant communication with the other world, but it had a similar spiritual effect.

It was startling to me—though this fact was sitting there in all the chronologies I’ve read of the man—that Thoreau was only 28 when he went to Walden Pond, 30 when he left. He didn’t go to become a hermit, according to Wall—plenty of people came to see him at his little house, and he usually went home for Sunday dinner most weeks—but to devote himself to his writing; he’d been floundering around since graduating from Harvard, had worked as a teacher, worked briefly in the pencil factory, tried to make money by publishing writing or giving lectures. He finally decided to reduce his needs and see how that worked. He got a substantial amount of work done at the pond, wrote a draft of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, took the trip and wrote the notes that would later become the posthumous book The Maine Woods, and of course did the journal writing that he would eventually turn into his masterpiece. He left not because he was tired of the experiment but because Emerson was going to Europe for a year and wanted Thoreau to look after his family. It was Emerson who owned the land, and like a shrewd Yankee businessman he immediately rented the house to someone else. Otherwise Thoreau might have lived there much longer.

For the rest of his life he lived in his family’s attic and made a living largely as a surveyor—a job in which he took great pride—and a lecturer. Many of his most famous essays, including “Walking” and “Civil Disobedience,” were written first as lectures, and he gave them repeatedly, in a world before YouTube. The man I’ve always thought of as a dour moralist was apparently quite funny as a lecturer, and left people rolling in the aisles (I’ve found parts of Walden hilarious). He was also extremely energetic as a writer and scholar; in 1852-53 alone, he wrote 1253 pages in his journal, 500 pages in the notebooks he kept about Native Americans, and two new drafts of Walden.

That having been said, he spent plenty of time going on hiking expeditions, climbing mountains, accompanying people on hunting expeditions, though he himself didn’t hunt (he did eat the meat others got. Despite that chapter Higher Laws in Walden, he seems to have eaten meat all his life. But he was just as happy living on nuts and bread, whatever was available). He had close friends who accompanied him on these expeditions; he seems to have been a man who had a few close friendships, rather than many acquaintances. (Walls seems to think he was gay, though she doesn’t make a big deal of it, and there is no evidence that he ever had a sexual relationship.) He needed to make money, and wanted to publish his writing, but was not terribly successful; he published only two books, and a smattering of essays, in his lifetime. The original version of Walden sold a little over 2,000 copies.

The man was a perfectionist in everything—Walden went through multiple drafts—but he always seemed more interested in the new thing, writing up what went on that day, recording yesterday’s walk. Though there was one period in his life when he was suddenly weak, apparently from the tuberculosis bacillae making their way down into his joints, he did not suffer repeated bouts of tuberculosis, the way some writers did. But his final illness was quite debilitating; he stopped writing even in his journal. His death bed statements have all become part of Thoreau lore: “I was not aware that we had quarreled,” when an aunt asked him if he’d made his peace with God, “One life at a time,” when he was asked if he was ready for the next life, and the final murmured last words, “moose, Indians.”

Thoreau has always been one of my literary heroes, because he understood the value of writing both as a way to explore the self (his journal is said to be 2.000,000 words long) and as a way of communicating with others (if he had written only “Civil Disobedience,” his place in world history would be secure). He did live deliberately, and lived on his own terms. Walls’ biography only increased my admiration for the man. And my hat is off to her for a lifetime of scholarly work. This book is the culmination of it.

www.davidguy.org

[Carl Safina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I finally finished reading the superb Thoreau biography by Laura Walls. One of those books I savored because I did not want it to end.

Every paragraph was excellent. It was like opening up the drapes and windows on a man I’d long considered a hero but knew nothing, really, about. What an incredible person and absolutely excellent book!

[Claire · Rating 5 out of 5]

AHHH 😭😭😭😭 that was EXCELLENT. One of the BEST biographies I have ever read. Laura is an incredible historian, writer, and storyteller. I LOVE NARRATIVE HISTORIES!!! Goals. She truly brought Thoreau to life. I felt like I got to know him. I feel like we’re friends now… haha! Finishing this book, reading about Thoreau’s death was an emotional experience. I’m a little heart broken. Thus begins my newest book hangover.

We have so much to learn from Thoreau…everyone must read this book…on top of Thoreau’s writing. Again, this book was simply a masterpiece.

[John David · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t know whether or not Laura Dassow Walls’ biography was specifically intended to be published in the bicentennial year of Thoreau’s birth, but if it was, there could be few gifts as memorable. Should anyone’s memory last after their death, they could hardly ask for a more dedicated or curious biographer than Walls. In a mere 500 pages, the reader sees the transformation of Thoreau from the often-stereotyped hermit and perhaps even a misanthrope into a fuller, more accurate picture of a man who was able to balance his inward life with vital social changes, and an engaged scientist whose studies of nature were deeply rooted in the ultimate concern for people and the environment we all share.

Born David Henry Thoreau (the inversion of first and last names was taken on in early adulthood) was born to a freethinking mother and a father who eventually made their living as the first great pencil manufacturers in New England. Thoreau went off to Harvard at the age of 16, and graduated four years later, but refused to pay the fee for a diploma. “Let every sheep keep its own skin,” he said, referring to the common practice of making diplomas on animal skin vellum. That same year, he founded the Concord Academy with his brother John. Its teaching philosophy eschewed rote memorization and instead tried to ignite the students’ innate curiosity and love of learning. Five years later, John developed tetanus while saving. He died in his brother’s arms.

After Harvard, Henry worked intermittently as a surveyor, publishing several articles on his excursions which we still consider today to be some of the first examples of what is called “nature writing.” In the weeks leading up to his 28th birthday, he built the 10’ by 15’ one-room cabin where he would live. On July 4, 1845 – a date one can’t help but imagine he chose because of it symbolism – he humbly began his Walden journal: “Yesterday I came here to live.” He would remain there for precisely 2 years, 2 months, and 2 days. Despite the picture that we get of Thoreau as distant and aloof, he would often talk to his neighbors. When he wanted company, he would leave a chair outside of his cabin’s door to invite visitors, and he went home once a week to have dinner with his family. During this time, Thoreau would take the notes and record the observations that eventually coalesced into “Walden Pond,” which wouldn’t be published until 1854.

After his stay at Walden, he repurposed his journals into an encyclopedic set of notebooks that catalogued nearly everything about the natural world around him, detailing everything from Darwin’s new idea of natural selection to the natural lore of Concord. In another work by Walls – “Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science” – she argues that Thoreau’s contributions were not just those of a curious neophyte, but were actually the observations of a serious, committed scientist.

To live fully – to live deliberately – to immerse ourselves in every moment – is the clarion command at the heart of “Walden,” and especially the journals. To take nothing for granted, to as Tennyson once put it, life live to the lees is what he exhorts us all to do. Walls’ biography is a call to live a life that – even if just to a tiny extent – is more like Thoreau’s. This book has inspired me to try to take small steps in that direction myself, and I review it in the faint hope that it will encourage others to follow along in a lifelong project of self-betterment and an increasing sense of appreciation for everything that surrounds us.

I want to take this opportunity to note that many of my comments here have been shared either fully grown or in seedling form by the three people with whom I built my own proverbial little 10’ x 15’ reading room: Hannah from the YouTube channel HannahsBooks, Peg from the channel TheHistoryShelf, and Sharon from the channel SharonGoforth. Not only did I have tremendous fun learning and sharing in their insights as we traded Voxer messages back and forth, but each one of them gave me few angles and perspectives from which to look at Thoreau. These three fellow readers allowed me, if I can steal the words of Thoreau himself, “to live deep and suck the marrow out of life” with their careful insights and thoughtful reading, and thereby made my own reading of the book that much more magical.

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Who is the real Henry David Thoreau? Is it Thoreau the writer? Thoreau the the philosopher? Thoreau the naturalist? The businessman? The adventurer? The political activist? The very complicated personality who finds a way to balance the multiple aspects of his life? Laura Dassow Walls finds a way to find balance too in this very well researched and composed biography. The day she signed my copy we talked about our mutual admiration of this great American philosopher/poet, evidenced by our long time involvement with the Thoreau Society. May we all find balance for our lives.

[Tiffany]

I really enjoyed this book and learned a great deal reading it--about the circle of friends and family round HDT, about the time, about the works. And it was, too, a great comfort to me to know that the really intense beard in the main photographs was an attempt to ward off tuberculosis, rather than an assertion of personal style. :)

[Marianne Meyers · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read many a biography, but this is one of the best I've ever read. Often in a definitive biography, the author will recite all the things that happened in the subject's life, it is dry or has the strong markings of the author's opinions. Laura Dassow Walls takes us on Thoreau's life journey in a way that makes things new and offers perspectives that make Thoreau a complete person rather than the a one-dimensional loner/naturalist/On Walden Pond man of Concord, MA. I found Thoreau's life compelling and came to understand him, his family life, his university life, his finding himself years, his engineering skills, his surveying skills, his forays into writing, his penchant for publishing in doomed literary magazines and not getting paid, his pioneering nature studies, his family's continual work as a stop on the underground railroad and his passion for abolition, his public speaking life, his friends who remained devoted to him, his profound awareness and notations of the natural world around him. In fact, in the 21st century, we can see the effects of global warming by comparing his lifetime measurements of the depths of Walden Pond and notations of what dates the ice formed and melted that he took each year vs. what is happening today in Concord. I have always loved his writings and observations but now I understand the man in his time and place much more clearly. In particular, I was moved by his close relationship with his brother John who died very suddenly in his early 20s and how that loss stayed with Henry throughout his life. I also learned about his years studying at Harvard, making it there on a poverty scholarship and how that affected him. His favorite part of Harvard, incidentally, was their incredible library. He was never like anyone else from his beginnings but found solace and certitude in the natural world around him, always staying grounded to be true to himself, even though many people wanted him to be what they felt he should be. Rumpled and untidy, he can be found walking through the trees, stopping to observe plantings, animals, and birds, taking the town on berry picking parties, rowing a boat up the Concord River, living and learning in the world, and he remains present for me this way.

[Steven Peck · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful life well lived.

[Derek · Rating 3 out of 5]

A solid if slightly dull biography. However, I got more out of Jay Parini’s chapter on Thoreau (really, about Walden) in Promised Land: 14 Books that Changed America.

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Detailed and moving autobiography of the Transcendentalist writer, philosopher and pioneering ecologist—an inspiring look at someone far ahead of his time.

[Max Lasco · Rating 4 out of 5]

Long slog of a read. It took me a solid 11 months. But alas it was worth it! Henry Thoreau is an incredibly interesting character. This book truly brings him alive. What an incredible life—activism, adventure, and writing!

[Jens · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my review of Laura Dassow Walls biography of Henry David Thoreau.

Laura Dassow Walls, educated at Washington university, wrote a biography of Thoreau with the main purpose of re-examining him and provide a highly readable book for the general public. Her preceding works suggests she is well versed in American transcendentalism, thereby her knowledge extends to the wider intellectual circle surrounding Thoreau. Within this circle we meet unique and interesting individuals like Margaret Fuller, Ellery Channing, Bronson Alcott, the Peabody sisters, and of course Ralph Waldo Emerson, the one inextricably tied with Thoreau and to whom Thoreau owns his awakening.

This Biography is densely informative, but Walls dazzling prose makes the reading experience more joyous than laborious.

The re-examination of Thoreau essentially means that Walls’ portrayal makes him relatable in the 21st century. Living in a time long since passed Thoreau can still provide useful commentary on the destruction of natural habitats by the extractions of natural resources for our short-term benefit; I say short term benefit because in the end we are hurting ourselves with the continuing exploitation of the ecosystem, which Thoreau emphasized we are a part of not separated from. “From that day forward, Thoreau knew a truth few others fully understand: human beings are not separate from nature but fully involved in natural cycles, agents who trigger change and are vulnerable to the changes they trigger.” (page, 173). Living in the 19th century, Thoreau witnessed humanity walk over the threshold into the Anthropocene era with the advancements in industrialization. His retreat into nature where he sought (partially) solitude, the whistle from passing trains across Walden pond could still be heard. Even if the ramification of this radical change wasn’t immediately alarming to Thoreau he still had an eerie feeling within. He was right to feel this way, not long after his death in 1862, the Italian geologist Antonio Stoppani recognized in 1873 the effects human activity had on the earth’s system, he called this the 'anthropozoic era'. Thoreau may seem to be a contradictory figure, yes, he was a naturalist and he talked about the danger machines posed to society, but he was also infinitely curious about the function of machinery. Thoreau would eventually contribute to civilization encroachment into nature while working as a land surveyor, keep in mind he had to take the job for financial reasons, and he was painfully aware of what he was doing. According to Thoreau, the solution to all this was to create protected national parks largely untouched by us.

Living in post-revolutionary America, Thoreau was a staunch abolitionist along with his mother (Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau) and sisters (Helen and Sophia Thoreau). Their home operated as an underground railroad helping escaped slaves with safe passage to Canada. His sister Helen had regular correspondence with perhaps the most important African American in the 19th century, Fredrick Douglass.

America, a land founded on enlightenment principles of liberty, progress and self-determination, that freed itself from the British yoke was subjecting a part of their population to the yoke that hindered them in realizing sovereignty of the self. This view of African slaves as property is morally wrong because you are hurting someone belonging to the same species as you. Hindrance of self-actualization presented a barrier that meant a portion of the population in Thoreau’s homeland could not realize their potential, a potential that lies within us all, a fire that transcends us to new heights. Thoreau along with Emerson even helped to transcend the meaning of John Browns sword; the sword when you view it in practical terms is an instrument solely made to cause bodily harm. In the hands of captain Brown however, the sword became a symbol of freedom, and the man carrying it a saint. For clarification, John Brown led a raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia,
hoping to initiate a slave revolt that would spread to North-Carolina.

Walls has managed to change my perception of the so called “American hermit”. Thoreau was an impassioned man actively participating in his community.

Walls’ biography provides the reader with much more than I could ever put into my review. Abolitionism and naturalism play important roles, but keep in mind this is the story of his life from birth to his untimely death. Upbringing, education, social relations, family drama etc. is included in Walls’s rich biography.

Is this book worth your time? Yes, no, perhaps, it all depends on your reading taste. If biography is a genre you gravitate towards, then Walls’s book will not disappoint. If you are not well acquainted with the biographical genre, do not be deterred, it is still highly readable.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is the best biography and study of Thoreau that I have read to date. The only exception would be E.B. White's wonderful essay entitled "Walden-1954." But that was a tribute essay and not a full-fledged biography.

The writing is very good, the author brings in what brought her to Thoreau, and the book traces the life quite well. Some of the other biographies that I have read got lost a bit in Transcendentalism and thus lost me along the way. This work took a more straightforward approach and would, in my opinion, be highly readable for teenagers first coming to Walden in high school to adults looking at the life. Thoreau could be a dry, pedantic writer, so it helps to complement that with another person's study of his work. As Dassow Walls wrote, coming to Thoreau at the right time can be like catnip.

My Nook edition of this book was purchased at Barnes & Noble.

[Kristi · Rating 4 out of 5]

The greatest strength of Walls' biography of the Thoreau is her well-rounded approach to his life. Thoreau was a complex individual, whose career and character is often segmented into a partial focus. Walls writes a Thoreau, whose aspects are reunited into a whole man. Like all books, this work is not without its inconsistencies, authorial overstatements, and perhaps even errors. However, Walls' narrative is comprehensively researched, well-written, insightful, and a compassionately constructed representation of an extraordinary human life. Her work updates Thoreau scholarship with the first full-length biography published in decades. Marking Thoreau's bicentennial year, this biography represents Thoreau's legacy in the early twenty-first century. Well worth reading and reading again.

[Denny · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this dense, detailed biography of Henry David Thoreau. As with other outstanding biographies I've read, it's much more than just the story of one person's life. It's a thorough history of a provincial and literary era and contains many historical and biographical accounts & anecdotes about a wide range of Thoreau's peers and the prevailing cultural and political issues of America in the mid-19th century. I shudder to think of how thoroughly Laura Dassow Walls had to immerse herself in that world. Reading this book, it seemed to me at times that she must surely have known her subjects and lived among them. I know I could never spend so much of my time, will, and effort on a single subject, so I congratulate Walls for her dedication and for this worthy product of her labors.

[Brian Willis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Destined to be the biography of Thoreau for much time to come, this accessible yet deep intellectual biography gets us into the mind and thoughts of Thoreau. We see the development of his philosophy without an overwhelming amount of academic detail, but still stock full of the details that Thoreau himself noticed throughout his adult life. Walls sets us up nicely for his major works by detailing them in the chronology at the proper time, and then analyzing how they later popped into the books "A Week..." and "Walden". I breezed through this and couldn't put it down, and this is my first book about Thoreau. Enthusiastically recommended for those who want to suck the marrow of what Thoreau was about without being condescending. Top rate.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

If I wasn't charmed by Thoreau before reading this biography, I certainly am now.

Having read Walden, unearthing more of his biographical details and investigating more of his political context deepened my appreciation for his work and perspective. His keen sense of nature as an all-encompassing cycle sets him apart as a 19th century thinker - his ideas wonderfully blending the poetic, philosophic, and scientific.

What this read did for me perhaps more than anything else was to situate and clarify a beautiful anachronism Thoreau uttered at the end of his time on earth, "Thus in the midst of death we are in life."

[Jon M. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Henry David Thoreau: A Life
Laura Dassow Walls
(University of Chicago Press, 640 PP)

Since schooldays, I have been drawn to the author of Walden and Civil Disobedience – and so has Laura Dassow Walls. She brilliantly frames the concerns of the most enduring transcendentalist, demonstrating why Thoreau remains important today: his concerns feel nearly as present as they must have felt in the 1840s. “[I]t was clear to him that the American Revolution was incomplete: inequality was rife, materialism was rampant, and the American economy was wholly dependent on slavery,” Walls writes.

Thoreau’s career began with him declaring that his elders had created this mess and seemed unable or unwilling to clean it up. Some of those elders were exempt from his judgement, however. Men like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Orestes Brownson had an early, positive influence on Thoreau. I particularly enjoyed how Walls tells the story of these mentor friendships. In the chapter, “Transcendental Apprentice”, on Thoreau’s relationship with Emerson, she selects quotations that are just right, including Emerson writing in his journal: “Every thing that boy says makes merry with society though nothing can be graver than his meaning” for he is “spiced throughout with rebellion”. Thoreau was not yet 21, and after meeting Emerson he began what became one of the greatest works of American literature, his Journal; it begins with Thoreau recounting a conversation he’d just had with Emerson: “‘What are you doing now?’ he asked, ‘Do you keep a journal?’ – So I make my first entry today.”

Robert D. Richardson’s masterful Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (1986) remains the definitive intellectual biography, but Walls reveals Thoreau the writer, situating his ­formation and influences in mid-nineteenth- century America as no biographer has before. She explains, for example, the debilitating effect that Edward T. Channing, professor of rhetoric at Harvard, had on the young Thoreau. The professor’s biting sarcasm stunted his mind and enthusiasm, and those of many others of Thoreau’s generation who took Channing’s obligatory courses.

“It took 10 years and a move to Walden Pond to shake himself free,” Walls concludes. There were more positive influences, such as Lucy Jackson Brown, a married woman with children, whose husband had recently ­abandoned her. As a young Harvard graduate, Thoreau wrote poems and left them where Brown would find them.

Soon, Thoreau was teaching writing to young boys at a school of his founding in Concord, Massachusetts. Unlike Professor Channing, who had assigned arcane topics that puzzled his students, Thoreau did the opposite: “Write on something you know, something before you,” he urged. A few years on, when Thoreau was a boarder in the Emerson household, the mentor commissioned the apprentice, who was prone to moping around the house, to review a series of natural history reports published by the State of Massachusetts. A month later, Thoreau had produced 50 pages which Emerson didn’t much like, but he needed to fill the July issue of the transcendentalist literary journal, the Dial. Thoreau’s article, which dismissed the reports but offered the first serious taste of his enthusiasm for wildness and woods, was the real birth of the writer. “A Natural History of Massachusetts” first appeared in 1842. While Emerson was striving to save religion from dogmatism and institutions, Thoreau brought a similar ­expediency and immediacy to the interpretation of the natural world.

Then there was the brief apprenticeship of Thoreau to the New York journalist (and later politician) Horace Greeley, who offered to be his literary agent. There would be times when the author of Walden would take Greeley’s advice over Emerson’s; at other times he would not, as when Greeley urged Thoreau to write essays on each of his popular Concord friends. Greeley would pay Thoreau $25 (£19) for each essay, place them in magazines, and then publish them together as a book. Thoreau said no.

Many other writing projects, experiments, failures and successes would follow, but most of all Walden and the venerable Journal, Thoreau’s real life’s work and a favourite of former US President Jimmy Carter. Walls reveals interesting details, too, surrounding the composition of Civil Disobedience, which Thoreau first wrote as a lecture to be delivered at the Concord Lyceum. The response of his audience led to revisions, creating the final version of this slim treatise (1849), that was subsequently to influence Gandhi, Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy.

One final note: Laura Dassow Walls is a professor at one of the top Catholic universities in the US, Notre Dame in Indiana. Curious, after finishing her book I called to ask her about her own religious faith. “I am not Catholic,” she told me. “Like Thoreau, I am formally unchurched but deeply interested in religion.” She added: “A big reason I came to Notre Dame was to explore religious history with people who welcome such enquiries. And you’ll notice I’m far more engaged with Thoreau’s Catholic friends – Brownson, Hecker and Rouquette, for instance – than others have been.” This Catholic slant does indeed inform her biography, and is another of the fresh insights into Thoreau that Walls has given us.

[Jim Cherry · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best biography on Thoreau I've read (and that's a lot) the only book that gives you the feeling of "knowing" Thoreau.

[Chris Stanley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Remarkable portrait of a fascinating character, well researched and an absolute joy to read.

[Martyn Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a remarkable literary biography, both in its clear narration of Henry David Thoreau’s life and its sensitivity to the ways that his thought participates in questions that now loom large. Laura Dassow Walls approaches Thoreau with a sense of his importance in the American story, and with personal memory as to how transformative a reading of Walden can be. She opens the preface with this: “Everyone who comes to Thoreau has a story,” and then describes her youthful encounter with a paperback of Walden. I too can easily picture the mass market paperback of Walden that I first read in high school. It became the book that most defined the life I was striving to find. When I worked at a fast food restaurant in Southern California during my summers home from college, I would look up at the nearby mountains, including national forest and wilderness lands, and I’d wonder why an ideal like Walden felt so distant now. Walls tackles that young question in the preface. Much of Thoreau’s published work relied on the “commons”—that is, spaces open to everybody. My younger self, looking out the broad windows of a fast food restaurant, could see nothing that answered to the “commons.” In the writing of Thoreau we can learn not just to mourn the loss of Walden, but to imagine a future commons.

Walden, like the poetry of his contemporary Walt Whitman, first rang true to me as I was in the midst of contructing a Self. I read this book as a song of the natural Self. This biography gave me a new perspective on Thoreau, allowing me to see his questioning of individualism. In my own development I’ve moved away from thinking about Self to keeping my eyes cast outward at the world, and taking Place as my primary subject. Wall sets out Place as Thoreau’s great, even ultimate concern: “No American writer is more place centered than Thoreau.”

This biography re-oriented me to the nature of Thoreau’s Walden project. What did it mean for Thoreau to take up residence at his cabin in the woods? On one reading he’s offering a template for taking off and living a self-sufficient life in the woods. This popular reading of Walden is represented in the case of Chris McCandless, whose story was depicted in the book and film Into the Wild. It’s a call for social isolation and steady Self work. But Walls presents Walden in a social light. Thoreau never made an escape from society, but actually planted himself front and center in the middle of society: “...never before had he been so conspicuous.” He had taken up this life near a well-traveled road and a popular fishing hole. That was no accident; he was engaged in a public argument about how life should best be lived. The Hebrew prophets often spoke words from God, but other times God instructed them to perform symbolic acts in the sight of the people. The prophet Ezekiel was commanded to lie on his side for a certain number of days or to cut off and burn a portion of his hair. These were acts that drew attention to his message in a manner not so different from a performance artist today. Thoreau’s drastically simplified life at Walden was a spectacle by which he called attention to another pattern of life.

A useful part of reading any literary biography is getting down the chronology of a writer’s work, and Wall gives a clear sense of how the books and essays succeeded each other. The act of living at Walden was something like his Declaration of Independence, but the actual writing of Walden took place in the attic of his family’s house in Concord. This highly social home setting (though obviously he had privacy in the attic) was the place where his best known writing took place. He lived in this household until his death from tuberculosis at age 44. This biography should (but won’t) banish the image of Thoreau as a hermit.

Walden will always remain the canonical text by Thoreau, but the biography succeeds in making the journals loom just as large. There was a match between the journal form and his deeper project. This emerges during his stay at Walden, where Wall describes him as becoming “a writer in an entirely new sense: instead of living a little, then writing about it, his life would be one single, integrated act of composition.” Books and successful lectures would be produced by Thoreau, but his journals best represent the seamless weaving together of life and composition. Journaling had long been a part of his life; it was a big part of the Transcendentalist intellectual project as defined by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson. But on November 8, 1850 Thoreau’s journals became something new. He would fill his pages with “everything he noticed and thought during his daily walk.” This would be his habit now until the end of his life. Wall writes about this transformation: “Thoreau simply stopped using his Journal as the means to the ‘real’ work of art somewhere else, and started treating the Journal itself as the work of art, with all the integrity that art demands.” This way of integrating life and work I find deeply attractive to me, and has been something of the grail I’ve been searching for through the creative use of digital platforms and tools. At least in academic life there has opened up a gap between the professional and the personal, and Thoreau offers a path to bring those together.

Another major area of inquiry for Thoreau was Native American experience. By the end of his life he’d completed twelve volumes of notes and observations on the history and customs of the indigenous peoples of North America. Some of the thoughts embedded in these notebooks made it into his posthumously published book The Maine Woods, but mostly he was never able to bring this part of his thinking to fruition. It’s nearly certain that a book would have grown from this material. More recently Robin Wall Kimmerer has written that Americans need to learn how to become indigenous, how to put away settler ways of thinking about the land. Thoreau could have called Americans to something like that in the 19th century.

Over the last few years Charles Darwin has moved into my personal canon of “Dark Green” thinkers. I regularly introduce students to the religious dimensions of The Origin of Species. I had known that Thoreau was an early reader of Darwin, but I hadn’t realized the extent to which he embraced Natural Selection. The creative use that Thoreau would have made of Natural Selection we’ll never know, but it does appear that Thoreau was shifting the dominant metaphor from Darwin’s trees to the concept of seeds and dispersion.

[Andy Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

This biography of Henry David Thoreau does a wonderful job of not only discussing Thoreau's many writings, but also of describing his full, complex life.
The author, Laura Dassow Walls, shows how history has misunderstood Thoreau. Much has been made about Thoreau not being truly isolated when he lived at Walden pond and wrote in his journals. However, Thoreau himself never claimed total isolation, never hid the fact that he often went to town to visit friends and have dinner with his family. Walls details how that does not take away from Thoreau's experience, he did live without the amenities available to those who lived in town, he was usually alone and he did focus on and write about the nature that surrounded him. And those writings about nature and life have never been surpassed.
Time has also caused some to consider Thoreau as a detached philosopher. This biography shows that Thoreau was a man of action. His travels into nature were not simply walks, they included vigorous canoeing, challenging climbs bushwhacking his way to the top of rugged summits. It was during these travels that his attitudes towards Native Americans evolved from the stereotype of his day, surprisingly shared by many of his fellow transcendentalists, to a genuine respect.
But the best evidence of his action was his participation in the underground railroad at a time when it was very dangerous. Walls explains that Thoreau would not commit his illegal actions to paper but shows references to his actions that can be understood by other evidence at the time. Thoreau also helped organize action against federal marshals trying to enforce the fugitive slave act. Thoreau also met with John Brown and supported his efforts, after Brown was arrested at Harper's Ferry, Thoreau wrote and spoke in Brown's defense, initially a very unpopular and dangerous thing to do though Thoreau helped changed the time's popular opinion. And in his most dangerous act, Thoreau drove one of Brown's conspirators on part of his escape to Canada.
There are also great antidotes throughout the biography. One was when he and Bronson Alcott visited Walt Whitman shortly after the second edition of Leaves of Grass. For the second edition, Whitman included a compliment from Ralph Waldo Emerson, perhaps the first book cover blurb, without getting the more famous Emerson's permission. During the sometimes awkward visit, the three discussed Emerson's anger about Whitman's use of Emerson's quote
This is a great book about a misunderstood man who was so ahead of his time. I highly recommend

[Mike Mikulski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Henry David Thoreau was a man of ideas in an age when America was starting to redefine itself. He was a philosopher, naturalist, lecturer, abolitionist and, in the biographer Walls’s opinion, a writer inspired by close observation of the people and environment around him.

He regularly communed with Ralph Waldo Emerson, a mentor who would bow out of support at critical times in Thoreau’s life. He was friends with Margaret Fuller and Nathaniel Hawthorn and had close acquaintances with Walt Whitman, Horace Greeley and the Alcott family.

He communed with nature as documented in Walden, but also traveled and wrote about the disappearing wilderness of Maine and the wild shore of Cape Cod.

He was a strong abolitionist who was incensed at new federal fugitive slave laws that allowed bounty hunters to seize former slaves in the north and was a supporter of John Brown before and after Brown’s raid on a federal garrison at Harper’s Ferry. Thoreau’s rhetoric after Harper’s Ferry helped paint Brown as a anti-slave hero instead of a crazed terrorist to the Union cause.

Late in his short life, Thoreau was one of the first American’s to read Darwin’s Origin of the Species and meshed these ideas with his own theories of plant and Forest succession.

It is sad that he was lost at the age of 44 to consumption.

Laura Dassow Walls writes a detailed biography meshing writings from Thoreau’s extensive journals and letters with friends, journalists and correspondence of both Thoreau’s and those around him She depicts Thoreau as a man just as comfortable conversing with Irish laborers, Native American guides and hunters, Cape Cod lighthouse keepers and fishermen as he was with the top intellectual minds of the day. Walls depicts a time of change in education, spiritual thought and the debate on human rights and the morality of slavery. An excellent biography that makes me want to explore Thoreau’s writings beyond Walden.