Henry David Thoreau was born on July 12, 1817, in Concord, Massachusetts, the third of four children. His family lived on a modest, sometimes meager, income; his father, John, worked by turns as a farmer, schoolteacher, grocer, and pencil-maker; his mother, Cynthia, was a teacher and would take in boarders when money was scarce. Young Henry’s gifts manifested themselves early. He wrote his first piece, “The Seasons,” at age ten, and memorized portions of Shakespeare, the Bible, and Samuel Johnson while studying at the Center School and Concord Academy. In addition to his academic pursuits, Henry rambled through the countryside on exploratory walks and attended lectures at the Concord Lyceum, where as an adult he would fascinate audiences with his discourses on life on Walden Pond.
Thoreau began his studies at Harvard College in 1833. His years at Harvard were stimulating, if solitary; he immersed himself in a traditional humanities curriculum of multiple languages, anatomy, history, and geography. Upon graduation in 1837, he began teaching in Concord at the Center School, the public school he’d attended as a boy, but left his post after being told to administer corporal punishment to a student. During these years following college Thoreau published his first essay and poem, began lecturing at the Concord Lyceum, and attended Transcendentalist discussions at the home of his mentor, the renowned essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. At Emerson’s urging, Thoreau started a journal—a project that would become his lifelong passion and culminate in more than two million words.
A boat trip with his brother, John, in 1839 set the foundation for his well-known work A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Sadly, unforeseen tragedy separated the tightly knit brothers in 1842, when John died of lockjaw caused by a razor cut. The following year, Thoreau joined Emerson in editing the Transcendental periodical The Dial, a publication to which Thoreau would become a prolific contributor. He also pulled up stakes for a time, accepting a position to tutor Emerson’s children in Staten Island, New York. Half a year later, Thoreau returned to his family’s house in Concord, deeply affected by the abolitionists he had met in Manhattan. He dedicated much of his time to lectures and essays advocating abolition and became involved in sheltering runaway slaves on their journey north.
In 1846 Thoreau was briefly imprisoned for refusing to pay a poll tax to the village of Concord, in protest against the government’s support of slavery, as well as its war of expansion with Mexico. His experience in the Concord jail led to the writing of what would later be titled “Civil Disobedience.” Unappreciated in Thoreau’s lifetime, “Civil Disobedience” is now considered one of the country’s seminal political works. During this period, Thoreau built his cabin on Walden Pond and lived there for a little more than two years. In this small home on Emerson’s property, he began writing his most enduring work, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, and finished the manuscript for A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. When Walden was published in 1854, sales were brisk and its reception favorable, although Thoreau’s work as a whole remained somewhat obscure during his lifetime.
As the years passed, Thoreau’s commitment to the antislavery movement strengthened, as did his popularity as a lecturer and essayist. Even in the declining health of his later years, he remained a man of conviction and action, writing on many subjects and participating in various political causes until shortly before his death from tuberculosis. George Eliot’s review of Walden singles out qualities that attract readers to this day: “a deep poetic sensibility” and “a refined as well as a hardy mind:” Henry David Thoreau died on May 6, 1862, in Concord.
The World of Henry David Thoreau, Walden, and ”Civil Disobedience”
1817 Henry David (christened David Henry) Thoreau is born on July 12, in Concord, Massachusetts, to John and Cynthia Thoreau; he is the third of four children.
1818 Henry’s family moves to nearby Chelmsford; his father opens a grocery store, which does not prove profitable.
1819 Walt Whitman is born on May 31.
1821 Financial straits force Henry’s family to move again, this time to Boston, where his father takes a job as a schoolteacher.
1823 The Thoreau family returns to Concord, where Henry’s father takes over the family pencil-making business. Henry enters the Concord Center School. Continued financial strain forces his mother to take in boarders.
1827 Henry writes his earliest known essay, “The Seasons.” John James Audubon’s The Birds of America is published.