A short life of the author
Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was born on 12 July 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts, the town with which he would be permanently identified. His father ran a pencil factory; his mother was gregarious and politically active. Thoreau attended Harvard College (1833–1837), returned to Concord, and never really left. He taught school briefly, worked in the pencil factory, and became a surveyor, but his real vocation was observation — of nature, of himself, of the moral condition of his society.
Life and Career
Thoreau’s decisive relationship was with Ralph Waldo Emerson, his neighbour and mentor, in whose household he lived intermittently and on whose land at Walden Pond he built the cabin in 1845. The two years, two months, and two days Thoreau spent at Walden (4 July 1845 to 6 September 1847) produced the most famous experiment in American living and the book that records it.
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), his first book, was published at Thoreau’s own expense by James Munroe. It sold poorly — of 1,000 copies printed, only 219 were sold, and Thoreau was left with 706 unsold copies. “I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes,” he wrote in his journal, “over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.”
Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854, Ticknor and Fields, Boston) was published five years after A Week and was better received, though it too sold modestly in Thoreau’s lifetime — approximately 2,000 copies. It has never been out of print.
“Resistance to Civil Government” (1849, later known as “Civil Disobedience”) — an essay growing out of Thoreau’s 1846 night in the Concord jail for refusing to pay his poll tax in protest against slavery and the Mexican War — is one of the most influential political essays ever written. Gandhi read it in South Africa; Martin Luther King Jr. read it at Morehouse College. Its argument — that the individual conscience has a duty to resist unjust laws — remains the philosophical foundation of nonviolent protest.
Thoreau was an active abolitionist who assisted fugitive slaves on the Underground Railroad and gave passionate public speeches defending John Brown after the Harper’s Ferry raid. He contracted tuberculosis and died on 6 May 1862 in Concord. He was forty-four. His last words were reported as “moose” and “Indian.”
Major Works and Themes
Thoreau’s subject is the examined life — the deliberate, attentive engagement with nature, self, and society that he believed was the only worthwhile human occupation. His prose is epigrammatic, paradoxical, and dense with observation; it rewards slow reading and rereading.
Walden (1854) is structured around the cycle of a single year at the pond, though Thoreau actually spent two years there and compressed the experience for literary effect. The book is simultaneously a practical manual (“Economy,” the famous first chapter, is a detailed accounting of expenses), a philosophical treatise, a nature journal, and a spiritual autobiography. Its sentences — “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”; “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately” — have entered the American language.
His journals — over two million words, kept from 1837 until shortly before his death — are his greatest literary achievement, a record of daily observation so patient and precise that they have become important documents for modern ecologists studying the effects of climate change on New England.
Critical Reception and Legacy
Thoreau was not widely read in his lifetime and was overshadowed by Emerson. His reputation grew steadily in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, accelerated by the environmental movement, and he is now regarded as one of the essential American writers — alongside Emerson, Whitman, and Dickinson — and as a founding figure of American environmentalism.
Key Works
- A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849)
- “Civil Disobedience” (1849)
- Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854)
- The Maine Woods (1864, posthumous)
- Cape Cod (1865, posthumous)
- Journals (1906, 14 volumes)
Collecting Thoreau
Thoreau is a major collecting author, anchored by Walden and supported by a small but significant bibliography.
Walden (1854, Ticknor and Fields, Boston) is the essential title. The first edition is bound in brown cloth with gilt lettering. First-state copies are identified by an advertisement leaf at the back for A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers priced at $1.00 (reduced from $1.25 because of the unsold stock). Fine copies bring $15,000–$50,000. Copies in exceptional condition have exceeded $100,000 at auction.
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849, James Munroe, Boston) is Thoreau’s first book, published in an edition of 1,000. The unsold copies were returned to Thoreau, and many were eventually given away or sold cheaply. First editions in the original cloth bring $3,000–$10,000.
Thoreau manuscripts and autograph letters are rare and institutional in destination. His journals are at the Pierpont Morgan Library; other manuscripts are at the Concord Free Public Library and the Huntington Library. Letters surface occasionally at auction and bring $5,000–$20,000.