The Works of Henry David Thoreau: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers/Cape Cod/Civil Disobedience/Walden

by Henry David Thoreau

Book by Thoreau, Henry David

Hardcover

Published April 1, 1995

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

[Linda Hollingsworth · Rating 2 out of 5]

This includes many of his works including Civil Disobedience, Walking, and Walden, three of my favorites. If you aren't familiar with Civil Disobedience it is the standard for living by one's individual ethics regardless of the positions of the state.

Most people are familiar with at least segments of Walden, but I urge everyone to read all of this experiment to live a simple life without the meaningless trappings of society...an honest and detailed account full of beautiful descriptions of his life at Walden Pond.

In Walking Thoreau also describes the joys and beauties of nature that may be appreciated by simply walking and noticing. This is sometimes accompanied by a jaunty air of high spirits, as though the very act of taking a walk put him in good humor. He was in every sense an environmentalist before anyone knew what that was.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I got this set as a gift before I started college and read the books throughout that last summer at home. Even though I'm not a big nature buff, there's something about Thoreau that makes me want to pack up a cooler and a tent and live in the woods for a while. The simplicity of life is front and center here as are laments of a changing society becoming a slave to technology and creature comforts. It's easy to see the parallels to today.
I'm not planning on giving up my flat-screen HDTV or my high-speed internet connection any time soon. But every time I read these books, the thoughts of running off to the woods pop into my mind.

[Russell Huntley]

I've read some of it...not finished