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Henry David Thoreau

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  Henry David Thoreau was born July 12, 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts, in his grandmother's house. His parents were John Thoreau and Cynthia Dunbar and he was the third of four children. His sister Helen and brother John, Jr., were the oldest. His other sister, Sophia, was born three years after him. He was baptized David Henry Thoreau but since everyone always called him Henry, he eventually legally changed his name to Henry David. He was from a family where money was usually short- his father's efforts in storekeeping ended in various financial problems, so he started making pencils and selling them from their home. Thoreau's mother also helped by taking in boarders.

  For a few years, the Thoreaus lived in Boston, while his father taught school there. When Thoreau was 16, he earned a partial scholarship to Harvard, and the family was able to scrape up the rest of the money. He did well at Harvard and met Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was also from Concord, MA, and they became life-long friends. After college, he began to publish essays in the local newspaper-called The Dial. In 1837, Thoreau began teaching in Concord's Center School. However, when a member of the school board insisted he flog the students for discipline, he chose six students at random, smacked them all with a switch and then quit his job. Neither the officials nor the class got the point, however. After that, he worked in his father's pencil shop. He managed to improve the machines and formulas that the business was using, but pencil-making wasn't the job he wanted to work at forever, and eventually Thoreau started his own private school. His brother, John, also joined him in working at the school. The school offered field trips and nature walks, which weren't very common back then, as well as students from all over the world-two were from Cuba.

  The school had to be shut down when John Thoreau fell ill with tuberculosis. After that, Henry Thoreau lived with the Emersons as their live-in gardener and general handyman. In January of 1842, Thoreau's brother contracted lockjaw from a small cut and died suddenly. Henry was so grief-stricken that he experienced a psychosomatic version of the same disease.

  After some recovery, Thoreau went to Staten Island in New York, to work as a tutor with the family of William Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson's brother. However, Thoreau was so home-sick for Concord that he moved back within a year. Luckily, his improvements in the family pencil business had increased the profits enough for them to build their own house (they had previously been living with aunts and uncles). Thoreau and his father built the new house themselves. About this same time, Thoreau's friend, Emerson, bought a woodland lot near Walden Pond, on the outskirts of Concord. In the spring of 1845, Thoreau arranged to build a small house of his own there.

  At Walden, in 1845, Thoreau began the living experiment for which he is most famous. For two years, two months and two days, from July 4, 1845 to September 6, 1847, he lived in a small, crude house that he built himself. Here he worked on writing, learning and enjoying the nature around him. His first important work, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (published in 1849), was written here. During his second year at Walden, he was arrested for not paying his poll tax. He had paid all the other taxes except this one because the taxes would go to support slavery. Sam Staples, the tax collector, had ignored Thoreau's failure to pay for three years, and even offered to pay the amount for him, if he was short on cash. However, for Thoreau, it was a simple matter of principle and he refused to pay it, so he went to jail. But before 24 hours had even gone by, someone paid it for him (probably one of his aunts). Thoreau was furious about the whole matter but wrote about the experience in his essay, "Civil Disobedience." He also gathered the material for his book, Walden, or, Life in the Woods, published in 1854, for which he is most well-known.

  After living at Walden, Thoreau moved back to his parent's house, where he lived for the rest of his life. He continued to write, lecture, and travel but remained relatively unappreciated until after his death. Only two of his major books were published during his lifetime-A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and Walden, or, Life in the Woods. Unfortunately, he came down with tuberculosis at the beginning of the Civil War and died May 1862.

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