Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau was born David Henry Thoreau on July 12, 1817, in Concord, Massachusetts, and died there on May 6, 1862. He worked as a naturalist, essayist, poet, and philosopher, and was a key figure in the transcendentalist movement. His reputation rests mainly on *Walden*, a book about living simply in nature, and the essay "Civil Disobedience," which argues that citizens should resist an unjust government.

Thoreau’s complete writings—books, journals, and poetry—fill more than twenty volumes. He made lasting contributions to natural history and philosophy, anticipating ideas central to modern ecology and environmental history. His style blends careful observation of nature, personal experience, sharp argument, symbolism, and historical stories, with a poetic touch, philosophical restraint, and attention to practical details. He was fascinated by survival against harsh conditions, historical change, and natural decay, and urged people to cut through waste and illusion to find life’s real necessities.

A lifelong abolitionist, Thoreau gave speeches attacking the fugitive slave law, praised the writings of Wendell Phillips, and defended John Brown. His ideas about civil disobedience later shaped the thinking of Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. Though sometimes called an anarchist in retrospect, he is more accurately described as a proto-anarchist.

His name’s pronunciation has varied. Amos Bronson Alcott and Thoreau’s aunt both said it should sound like “thorough,” with the first syllable stressed and the “h” pronounced, as in 19th-century New England. Edward Waldo Emerson wrote in 1918 that friends called him “Thórow.” In the early 1900s, renewed foreign interest led many to mistakenly stress the second syllable, a common modern error.

Thoreau had a memorable face. Ellery Channing described it: an aquiline nose (which Thoreau called his “most prominent feature”), large overhanging brows, deep-set blue eyes that sometimes looked gray, a forehead full of energy, and a mouth with prominent lips that, when silent, seemed pursed with thought.

He was born David Henry Thoreau, named after a deceased uncle. After college, he began calling himself Henry David but never legally changed it. He grew up in a modest Concord family; his father made pencils, and his mother was Cynthia Dunbar. His father’s side was of French Protestant descent, with a grandfather from Jersey. His maternal grandfather, Asa Dunbar, led Harvard’s 1766 “Butter rebellion,” the first recorded student protest in the American colonies. Thoreau had two older siblings, Helen and John Jr., and a younger sister, Sophia. None married. Helen died of tuberculosis at 37, John Jr. of tetanus at 27, Henry David of tuberculosis at 44, and Sophia of tuberculosis at 56.

He attended Harvard from 1833 to 1837, living in Hollis Hall and studying rhetoric, classics, philosophy, mathematics, and science. He was a member of the Institute of 1770. He refused to pay the five-dollar fee for a master’s diploma, calling it a charge for graduates who survived three years and had five dollars to spare. He said, “Let every sheep keep its own skin,” referring to the sheepskin vellum used for diplomas. His birthplace on Virginia Road in Concord still stands, restored by the Thoreau Farm Trust and open to the public.

After graduating, Thoreau found no interest in law, church, business, or medicine. In 1835, he took a leave from Harvard to teach in Canton, Massachusetts, living for two years at an earlier version of Concord’s Colonial Inn (his grandfather owned the first of the three buildings later combined). In 1837, he briefly taught at Concord’s public school but resigned rather than use corporal punishment. With his brother John, he opened the Concord Academy in 1838, a grammar school that introduced nature walks and visits to local shops. The school closed when John became fatally ill with tetanus.