iron-pokerishness, an uncompromising stiffness in his mental character,” said Nathaniel Hawthorne. Others were less kind. “Thoreau was literally the most childlike, unconscious and unblushing egotist it has ever been my fortune to encounter in the ranks of manhood,” said Henry James Sr., father of Henry James the novelist and William James the philosopher. The harshest criticism centered on Thoreau’s alleged hypocrisy. There he was pretending to live alone in the woods, self-sufficient, while sneaking off to his mom’s for pie and laundry service. It’s true. Thoreau wasn’t nearly as isolated at
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