Thoreau tried to make a virtue out of lack of rhythm. He said that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. Okay, but how did he know? He wrote elegantly about independence and forgot to thank his mom for doing his laundry. His name is eroding from classroom syllabi, and while his influences encompass the likes of Tolstoy, Proust, and Dickinson, his partisans seem much rarer today.
Instead, we should return to him both sides, pro and contra, agree that Thoreau is sooner evaluated than read and appreciate his first-rate prose, his questions about a life well-lived, and his reflections on nature and the environment, which in the era of climate change, are as vital to us now as they have ever been. A blog about books. Rare books. Aug 9, Writing the book took longer than his stay at the cabin In the book, Thoreau presents the narrative within the time frame of a year.
Walden was published to a mild reception. The book had a print run of 2, copies, which took five years to sell out. His friends, like Emerson , advocated for his work, which helped his book become the classic it is today. He received his education at the public school in Concord and at the private Concord Academy. Proving to be a better scholar than his more fun-loving and popular elder brother John, he was sent to Harvard. He did well there and, despite having to drop out for several months for financial and health reasons, was graduated in the top half of his class in Thoreau's graduation came at an inauspicious time.
In , America was experiencing an economic depression and jobs were not plentiful. Furthermore, Thoreau found himself temperamentally unsuited for three of the four usual professions open to Harvard graduates: the ministry, the law, and medicine.
The fourth, teaching, was one he felt comfortable with, since both of his elder siblings, Helen and John, were already teachers.
He was hired as the teacher of the Concord public school, but resigned after only two weeks because of a dispute with his superintendent over how to discipline the children.
For a while he and John considered seeking their fortunes in Kentucky, but at last he fell back onto working in his father's pencil factory. Thoreau's family participated in the "quiet desperation" of commerce and industry through the pencil factory owned and managed by his father.
Thoreau family pencils, produced behind the family house on Main Street, were generally recognized as America's best pencils, largely because of Henry's research into German pencil-making techniques. In , he decided to start his own school in Concord, eventually asking John to help him. The two brothers worked well together and vacationed together during holidays. In September , they spent a memorable week together on a boating trip up the Concord and Merrimack rivers to Mount Washington in New Hampshire.
About the same time both brothers became romantically interested in Ellen Sewall, a frequent visitor to Concord from Cape Cod. In the fall of the next year, both brothers — first John and then Henry — proposed marriage to her. But because of her father's objections to the Thoreaus' liberal religious views, Ellen rejected both proposals. When John endured a lengthy illness in , the school became too much for Henry to handle alone, so he closed it.
He returned to work in the pencil factory but was soon invited to work as a live-in handyman in the home of his mentor, neighbor, and friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson was by then already one of the most famous American philosophers and men of letters. The most notorious episode of his time at Walden Pond was the night he spent in jail after refusing to pay poll taxes. He felt that providing support to the government would indicate that he condoned all of its actions, including the Mexican American War, which could have potentially spread slavery westward.
This experience became the core of the ideas in the essay Resistance to Civil Government , commonly known as Civil Disobedience. This concept, along with others expressed in his later work Walden , were enormously radical for their time. But decades and even centuries later, the impact of his words would be distinctly felt throughout society.
Civil Disobedience , in particular, has been cited by leaders including Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King as an inspiration for their social movements. In Walden and elsewhere, many see the seeds of the modern environmentalist movement, years ahead of their time.
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