Henry David Thoreau
1817–1862

Henry David Thoreau, the ‘hermit of Walden’, born of Jersey stock at Concord Massachusetts on 12 July 1817, graduated at Harvard in 1837, became a teacher at Concord, and lectured. He soon gave up teaching and joined his father in making lead-pencils, but about 1839 began his walks and studies of nature as the serious occupation of his life. In that year he made the voyage described in his Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers (1849). Thoreau early made the acquaintance of Emerson, and in 1841–43 and in 1847 was a member of his household. In 1845 he built himself a shanty in the woods by Walden Pond, where he wrote much of the Week, his essay on Carlyle, and his most popular book, Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854). After the Walden episode he supported himself by whitewashing, gardening, fence-building and land-surveying. He also lectured now and then, and wrote for the magazines. He made three trips to the Maine woods in 1846, 1853 and 1857, described in papers collected after his death. In 1850 he made a trip to Canada which produced A Yankee in Canada (1866). He died in Concord on 6 May 1862.
Thoreau began in 1835 to keep a daily journal of his walks and observations, from whose thirty volumes were published Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881), Summer (1884) and Winter (1887). Other publications are Excursions in Field and Forest, with memoir by Emerson (1863), Cape Cod (1865), Letters to Various Persons, with nine poems (1865), Familiar Letters (1894) and Poems of Nature (1896).