1817-1862 · American essayist, naturalist and Transcendentalist, author of Walden
About Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was born in Concord, Massachusetts, graduated from Harvard in 1837, and earned his living as a schoolteacher, pencil maker in his family's business, handyman and land surveyor. A friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson and a leading voice among the New England Transcendentalists, he kept a vast journal, lectured at the Concord Lyceum, and published A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and Walden (1854). He died of tuberculosis in Concord in May 1862.
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”
Walden; or, Life in the Woods is Henry David Thoreau's account of the two years and two months, from July 4, 1845, to September 1847, that he spent living alone in a one-room house he built himself beside Walden Pond, about a mile and a half south of the village of Concord, Massachusetts. He compresses the experiment into the cycle of a single year, moving from summer through winter to the thaw of spring, in eighteen chapters.