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A Historical Guide to Henry David Thoreau
As an essayist, philosopher, ex-pencil manufacturer, notorious hermit, tax protester, and all-around original thinker, Thoreau led so singular a life that he is in some ways a perfect candidate for the historical and biographical treatments made possible by the Historical Guides to American Authors series format. William E. Cain, the volume editor, includes contributions on his relationship with 19th century authority and concepts of the land, which should help the volume's reach beyond those who read Thoreau for illumination to those general readers who love him for embodying the spirit of American rebellion.
304 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 2000
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June 24, 2021
Henry David Thoreau's work was not acknowledged until years after his death. In his lifetime he published only a handful of poems, a number of essays, and just two books, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Walden; or, Life in the Woods. The first book was a failure and the second only a modest success. His Concord neighbors knew that Thoreau was a writer, but few had any idea what exactly he wrote. Nor did they appreciate how different he was from Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great sage and mentor from whose influence Thoreau was obviously struggling to break free. Many who knew Thoreau found him prickly, defensive, and off-putting. He was the odd man of the town — a Harvard-educated young man who sauntered in the woods and meandered from one weird job to the next.
At different times in his life, Thoreau, who treated life as separated into distinct episodes, was a teacher, surveyor, pencil-maker, and natural historian. But first and foremost, he was a writer. "This is the most important fact to know about him," writes William E. Cain. "... that he was always writing." He began writing regularly while he was a student at Harvard in the 1830s and soon began keeping a journal that over the next twenty-five years totaled 2 million words. He wrote poetry and prose, but his real start came when he produced essays, poems, and translations for the Transcendentalist journal The Dial. He edited, revised, and stitched together work he had already done —combining it with much new material — to construct his first book, and, since he was a perfectionist, devoted years to writing, organizing, and reorganizing his second.
As it turns out, although his name is associated with the pleasures of the moment, Thoreau is one of the most deliberate and disciplined authors in American literary history. He persisted with his journal until serious illness intervened, and on his deathbed he was still writing, adding to his calendar of flowers and shrubs, making lists of birds and selections from his journals, and preparing articles for publication.
As a writer and social critic, Thoreau is bold and fortifying, "a power to be reckoned with and drawn upon for strength and inspiration." He was a dissenter in the truest sense of the word, going his own absolute road let hell blaze all it chooses. He has been the American author most beloved by reformers, nay- sayers, and dissidents. Gandhi read and translated Thoreau's writings when he campaigned in the 1900s and 1910s for Indian civil rights in South Africa, and he returned to these texts in subsequent decades when he called for Indian independence from the British: "My first introduction to Thoreau's writings was, I think, in 1907, or later, when I was in the thick of the passive resistance struggle. A friend sent me the essay on 'Civil Disobedience.' It left a deep impression on me." Civil Disobedience also was a rallying tract among resisters of the Nazi occupations in Europe. Martin Luther King, Jr., read the essay in college in the 1940s and remembered it in 1955 in the midst of the Montgomery bus boycott.
While this essay and parts of Walden have ignited broadly based reform and protest movements, Thoreau's main message is a personal one. He disliked groups, organizations, and institutions, which, he believed, threaten to divert us from honestly reflecting on our own lives and revivifying them. For him, learning how to live means simplifying. In Walden he writes, "No method nor discipline can supercede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry . . . or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity."
According to Cain, we should not miss seeing Thoreau in historical context — as a writer involved in the issues and controversies of mid-nineteenth-century America, a writer who shunned society and cultivated his own garden but nevertheless wrote about the intellectual movements and trends and social and political events of his era. He examined and commented acutely on education, Utopian theory and practice, labor and working conditions, immigration, poverty, and inequality; he studied the relationship between individual rights and the powers of local, state, and federal government; he attacked the enslavement of African Americans and the mistreatment of Native Americans. He said more than once that people pay far too much attention to newspapers and hence lose sight of permanent truths, yet friends and neighbors recalled that he read newspapers zealously. He was more absorbed in the issues of the day than he lets on; as a writer and intellectual, he knew much about the society of which he resisted being a member. His preoccupation with finding genuine value was the result of his extreme discomfort with the lust for getting and spending, the subordination of individuals to the state, and, for millions of enslaved African Americans, the denial of the freedom that America in theory guaranteed. Thoreau did not lead "a life of quiet desperation" himself, but he witnessed many who did, and he wanted to show them that they could cast off the consciousness that society had imposed on them, explains Cain.
In A Historical Guide to Henry David Thoreau, the authors survey Thoreau's life and literary career and highlight the social and political issues and historical events to which he responded. One of the essays comments on the nature of work, the marketplace, and gender in mid-nineteenth-century America, and notes the impact of the slavery crisis on Thoreau's social and political ideas. Another takes note of Thoreau's interest in homemaking and hospitality and describes the relationships between Walden and nineteenth-century domesticity.
As we learn from the third essay, Thoreau also was keenly interested in natural history and science. He took his scientific work very seriously, but for him the challenge was to contribute to the objective study of nature without losing his own literary identity. In Thoreau's day literary culture typically defined itself in opposition to science and technology, which were, it was claimed, separating persons from nature. He disagreed with this distinction, redefining the meanings of "science" and "technology" and exemplifying his conception of the bonds between self and nature in the kind of focused, meticulous, yet personalized writing he practiced in his journal.
The final essay analyzes the responses to Thoreau by his Concord neighbors. It was not his social or political views, or his walking in the woods, that disturbed them. It was Thoreau's individualism that mystifed and annoyed the Concord townspeople. Thoreau refused to sign petitions; he would not train with the militia; with the exception of the Concord Lyceum, he was unwilling to take part in any group or institution; and he went to jail rather than pay his poll tax. The essay describes the process through which people portrayed Thoreau's individualism as eccentricity: he became a New England "character." For the men and women of Concord, "Thoreau's life and work illuminated in troubling ways the changing boundaries between the individual and the community, and thus the making of his reputation dramatizes for us the interplay of social history and cultural memory."
Thoreau was proud of his writing and hoped that he would reach many readers, for he had important lessons to teach them. But he both did and did not care about the world's opinion. Thoreau is witty, playful, engaging in his prose, but sometimes he takes on a severe, upbraiding tone or flash an unpleasant edge in a phrase or sentence. He dares us to dislike him, to compare his principles with ours. Deeply interested in the events and crises of his own era, he sought to instruct Americans about the essential meaning of their society and history, as well as to show the art of living well.
Supplied with a collection of photographs and illustrations that clarify our understanding of Thoreau as a man of his times, the book is an amazing introduction to the life and work of this remarkable man. Highly recommended.
At different times in his life, Thoreau, who treated life as separated into distinct episodes, was a teacher, surveyor, pencil-maker, and natural historian. But first and foremost, he was a writer. "This is the most important fact to know about him," writes William E. Cain. "... that he was always writing." He began writing regularly while he was a student at Harvard in the 1830s and soon began keeping a journal that over the next twenty-five years totaled 2 million words. He wrote poetry and prose, but his real start came when he produced essays, poems, and translations for the Transcendentalist journal The Dial. He edited, revised, and stitched together work he had already done —combining it with much new material — to construct his first book, and, since he was a perfectionist, devoted years to writing, organizing, and reorganizing his second.
As it turns out, although his name is associated with the pleasures of the moment, Thoreau is one of the most deliberate and disciplined authors in American literary history. He persisted with his journal until serious illness intervened, and on his deathbed he was still writing, adding to his calendar of flowers and shrubs, making lists of birds and selections from his journals, and preparing articles for publication.
As a writer and social critic, Thoreau is bold and fortifying, "a power to be reckoned with and drawn upon for strength and inspiration." He was a dissenter in the truest sense of the word, going his own absolute road let hell blaze all it chooses. He has been the American author most beloved by reformers, nay- sayers, and dissidents. Gandhi read and translated Thoreau's writings when he campaigned in the 1900s and 1910s for Indian civil rights in South Africa, and he returned to these texts in subsequent decades when he called for Indian independence from the British: "My first introduction to Thoreau's writings was, I think, in 1907, or later, when I was in the thick of the passive resistance struggle. A friend sent me the essay on 'Civil Disobedience.' It left a deep impression on me." Civil Disobedience also was a rallying tract among resisters of the Nazi occupations in Europe. Martin Luther King, Jr., read the essay in college in the 1940s and remembered it in 1955 in the midst of the Montgomery bus boycott.
While this essay and parts of Walden have ignited broadly based reform and protest movements, Thoreau's main message is a personal one. He disliked groups, organizations, and institutions, which, he believed, threaten to divert us from honestly reflecting on our own lives and revivifying them. For him, learning how to live means simplifying. In Walden he writes, "No method nor discipline can supercede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry . . . or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen? Will you be a reader, a student merely, or a seer? Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity."
According to Cain, we should not miss seeing Thoreau in historical context — as a writer involved in the issues and controversies of mid-nineteenth-century America, a writer who shunned society and cultivated his own garden but nevertheless wrote about the intellectual movements and trends and social and political events of his era. He examined and commented acutely on education, Utopian theory and practice, labor and working conditions, immigration, poverty, and inequality; he studied the relationship between individual rights and the powers of local, state, and federal government; he attacked the enslavement of African Americans and the mistreatment of Native Americans. He said more than once that people pay far too much attention to newspapers and hence lose sight of permanent truths, yet friends and neighbors recalled that he read newspapers zealously. He was more absorbed in the issues of the day than he lets on; as a writer and intellectual, he knew much about the society of which he resisted being a member. His preoccupation with finding genuine value was the result of his extreme discomfort with the lust for getting and spending, the subordination of individuals to the state, and, for millions of enslaved African Americans, the denial of the freedom that America in theory guaranteed. Thoreau did not lead "a life of quiet desperation" himself, but he witnessed many who did, and he wanted to show them that they could cast off the consciousness that society had imposed on them, explains Cain.
In A Historical Guide to Henry David Thoreau, the authors survey Thoreau's life and literary career and highlight the social and political issues and historical events to which he responded. One of the essays comments on the nature of work, the marketplace, and gender in mid-nineteenth-century America, and notes the impact of the slavery crisis on Thoreau's social and political ideas. Another takes note of Thoreau's interest in homemaking and hospitality and describes the relationships between Walden and nineteenth-century domesticity.
As we learn from the third essay, Thoreau also was keenly interested in natural history and science. He took his scientific work very seriously, but for him the challenge was to contribute to the objective study of nature without losing his own literary identity. In Thoreau's day literary culture typically defined itself in opposition to science and technology, which were, it was claimed, separating persons from nature. He disagreed with this distinction, redefining the meanings of "science" and "technology" and exemplifying his conception of the bonds between self and nature in the kind of focused, meticulous, yet personalized writing he practiced in his journal.
The final essay analyzes the responses to Thoreau by his Concord neighbors. It was not his social or political views, or his walking in the woods, that disturbed them. It was Thoreau's individualism that mystifed and annoyed the Concord townspeople. Thoreau refused to sign petitions; he would not train with the militia; with the exception of the Concord Lyceum, he was unwilling to take part in any group or institution; and he went to jail rather than pay his poll tax. The essay describes the process through which people portrayed Thoreau's individualism as eccentricity: he became a New England "character." For the men and women of Concord, "Thoreau's life and work illuminated in troubling ways the changing boundaries between the individual and the community, and thus the making of his reputation dramatizes for us the interplay of social history and cultural memory."
Thoreau was proud of his writing and hoped that he would reach many readers, for he had important lessons to teach them. But he both did and did not care about the world's opinion. Thoreau is witty, playful, engaging in his prose, but sometimes he takes on a severe, upbraiding tone or flash an unpleasant edge in a phrase or sentence. He dares us to dislike him, to compare his principles with ours. Deeply interested in the events and crises of his own era, he sought to instruct Americans about the essential meaning of their society and history, as well as to show the art of living well.
Supplied with a collection of photographs and illustrations that clarify our understanding of Thoreau as a man of his times, the book is an amazing introduction to the life and work of this remarkable man. Highly recommended.
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