John, attend Concord Academy, where they study the classics, geography, science, and history. Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language is published.
1829 Henry first attends talks at the Concord Lyceum, where he will frequently speak as an adult.
1833 Thoreau enters Harvard University, the only child in his family to attend college; he spends many solitary hours studying the classics , numerous languages, history, and the sciences. The Abolition Act of 1833 outlaws slavery in the British Empire.
1835 During a semester’s leave of absence from Harvard to teach school in Canton, Massachusetts, Thoreau lives in the home of the Unitarian minister Orestes Brownson, who instructs him in German.
1837 Thoreau graduates from Harvard. He begins teaching at the Concord Center School, but resigns after being told to administer corporal punishment to a student. He begins attending Trancendentalist meetings at Ralph Waldo Emerson’s house. At Emerson’s urging he starts a journal, which becomes a lifelong project.
1838 Thoreau travels to Maine in search of a teaching job but soon returns to Concord; he and his brother, John, open a private school at the Concord Academy, which they operate until 1841. They find a devoted pupil in the young Louisa May Alcott. Thoreau gives the first of many speeches at the Concord Lyceum.
1839 Thoreau and John take a two-week trip on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, in a homemade boat; the journey inspires Thoreau’s later well-known work A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” is published.
1840 Ralph Waldo Emerson founds the Transcendentalist periodical The Dial, which serves as the forum for Thoreau’s first published essay and poem. Ellen Sewall rejects the marriage proposals of both Thoreau brothers.
1841 Thoreau moves into Emerson’s home, where he works for two years as a groundskeeper and repairman and reads widely from Emerson’s library. He comes up with the idea of living in a cabin on nearby Flint’s Pond. The first series of Emerson’s Essays is published.
1842 Thoreau’s brother, John, dies from lockjaw. Shortly after John’s death, Thoreau meets Nathaniel Hawthorne. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Poems on Slavery is published.
1843 Thoreau contributes to several publications and coedits The Dial with Emerson. He moves for half a year to Staten Island, where he tutors Emerson’s children. In New York he meets and associates with abolitionists and reformers.
1844 Upon his return to Concord, Thoreau becomes more active in the abolition movement, writing essays and speaking out against slavery. The second series of Emerson’s Essays is published. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Poems is published. Thoreau accidentally sets fire to the Concord Woods.
1845 In a small space on Emerson’s property, Thoreau builds his Walden Pond cabin, where he will live for the next two years. At Walden Pond, he writes A Week on the Merrimack and Concord Rivers and his first version of Walden. Poe’s The Raven and Other Poems is published.
1846 Thoreau makes another trip to Maine, where he climbs Mount Katahdin. In July he is jailed for refusing to pay a poll tax, in protest against the government’s support of slavery and the Mexican War. After a night in jail, he is released when someone (presumably a family member) pays the tax. The experience inspires the work that later will be titled “Civil Disobedience.”
1847 Thoreau moves out of the Walden cabin and into Emerson’s home. He gives a speech at the Concord Lyceum titled “A History of Myself.”
1848 He moves back into his family home. He delivers “The Rights and Duties of the Individual in Relation to Government” at the Concord Lyceum; the speech, hardly noticed in Thoreau’s lifetime, later will be published as the highly influential “Civil Disobedience.”
1849 A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers is published to lackluster reviews.“ Resistance to Civil Government,” the original published title of ”Civil Disobedience,“ appears. Thoreau visits Cape Cod for the first time.
1850 Thoreau travels to Cape Cod and Canada. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is published. The Fugitive Slave Act (part of the Compromise of 1850) is passed, stating that north- erners must return escaped slaves to their owners.
1851 Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is published.
1854 After five years of trying, Thoreau finds a publisher for Walden; or, Life in the Woods. The book is warmly received by critics, including George Eliot, who praises it in Westminster Review (January 1856).
1855 Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is published. Thoreau makes another trip to Cape Cod.
1856 Thoreau meets Whitman.
1857 Thoreau meets the activist and abolitionist John Brown. He travels to Maine and Cape Cod.