1854: Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau was twenty when he graduated from Harvard and returned to his hometown of Concord, Massachusetts.

Best Teaching Practices

He taught elementary school for a brief time, but resigned "in protest when he was instructed to flog some of his students" (The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter Ninth Edition: Beginnings to 1865, 900).

Brother John

Between 1838 and 1841, he ran the Concord Academy with his older brother, John, who was also his best friend.

John contracted tetanus in 1841, and on January 1, 1842, he died in his brother's arms.

Walden

Thoreau was 28 years old in 1845, when he moved onto a woodlot owned by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, who asked him to plant pine trees there. Three years earlier, Thoreau's brother John, died of tetanus, and one of Thoreau's reasons to move to Walden was to work through his grief and write a book about a trip he and his brother had taken on the Concord and Merrimack rivers. That book was published in 1849.

Mexican War

"During his time at Walden, Thoreau . . . spent one night of 1846 in jail when, in protest against what he regarded as the proslavery agenda of the war against Mexico, he refused to pay his poll tax. That experience would inspire 'Resistance to Civil Government' (1849), which in due time would become a world-famous essay on the relationship of the individual to the state" (The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter Ninth Edition: Beginnings to 1865, 901).

The Book

When Emerson went on a tour of Europe, he asked Thoreau to move into his house to help take care of his wife and kids, and five weeks before Emerson left for Europe, and Thoreau he agreed. Thoreau lived in the cabin he built near Walden Pond for two years, two months, and two days.

While he was living at Walden, many people were curious about what kind of experiment Thoreau was taking on, and Thoreau ended up answering those questions in a series of lectures. The lectures became 18 essays, which themselves became the book Walden, or, Life in the Woods, which was published in 1854, seven years after Thoreau left Walden. At the end of this life, Thoreau requested that new editions of the book use the simpler title Walden.

Abolitionism and John Brown

In the mid-1850s, "Thoreau emerged as one of the most outspoken abolitionists in the Concord area. In 1854 . . . he delivered his best-known antislavery speech, 'Slavery in Massachusetts,' at a rally in Framingham . . . Thoreau achieved his greatest prominence as an antislavery speaker with his defense of John Brown immediately after Brown's arrest at Harpers Ferry in October 1859. Before large audiences in Concord, Boston, and Worcester, Thoreau honored Brown's revolutionary antislavery aims"(The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter Ninth Edition: Beginnings to 1865, 901-02).

Thoreau "welcomed the Civil War, with its promise of ridding the nation of slavery" (The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter Ninth Edition: Beginnings to 1865, 902).

Forty-Four

After contracting tuberculosis, Thoreau died in Concord on May 6, 1862. He was 44.

Legacy

"In 1906 his journals were published for the first time in chronological order, in fourteen volumes as part of a twenty-volume set of his complete works. That same year, Mahatma Gandhi, in his African exile, read 'Resistance to Civil Government' and later acknowledged its important influence on his thinking about how best to achieve Indian independence. Later in the century, Martin Luther King Jr. would similarly attest to the crucial influence of Thoreau on his adoption of nonviolent civil disobedience as a key to the civil rights movement" (The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter Ninth Edition: Beginnings to 1865, 902).