Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) was an American essayist, poet, naturalist, and social critic associated with the transcendentalist movement in New England. Born in Concord, Massachusetts, he came from a family of pencil makers and attended Harvard College, where he studied natural history, philosophy, and languages. He formed close ties with leading transcendentalists, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, and pursued a life of intellectual inquiry, writing journals and essays that explored nature, ethics, and individual conscience.

Thoreau is best known for Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854), a reflective account of his two-year experiment living at Walden Pond from 1845 to 1847. The work merges natural observation with social critique and philosophical reflections on simplicity, self-reliance, and personal independence. Earlier, he published essays such as “Civil Disobedience” (1849), in which he argued that individuals have a moral duty to resist unjust laws through peaceful, noncooperation.

Thoreau’s writings extend beyond these works. His journals and essays contributed to American literary and philosophical discussions of nature, civil liberties, and reform. He has been influential for generations of readers and thinkers; his ideas about civil disobedience helped inspire nonviolent resistance movements led by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., and his reverence for the natural world shaped later environmental thought. Thoreau died in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1862 at the age of 44.