Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862) was an American essayist, poet, and leader of the transcendentalist movement. His most well known work is Walden.
- Henry David Thoreau: Poets.orgHenry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts on July 12, 1817. He was introduced to the countryside at a young age, and this first contact with the natural world sparked a lifelong fascination.
- The Thoreau SocietyFounded in 1941, The Thoreau Society, Inc. is the largest and oldest organization devoted to an American author. The Society has members from more than twenty countries around the world, the Penobscot Nation, and all fifty U.S. states. The Thoreau Society is committed to diversity and inclusion, and welcomes people of all ages, ethnicities, gender expressions and identities, origins, physical abilities, races, religions, and sexual orientations. In Walden, Thoreau wrote, “I desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible.” The Thoreau Society likewise recognizes that the contributions of all will continue to result in a more vital organization and a more vital world.
Research & Reference
- Thoreau, Henry David: American National BiographyAn American National Biography page on Henry David Thoreau.
- Henry David Thoreau: Credo ReferenceA Credo Reference landing page on Henry David Thoreau. This page includes links to reference works, journal articles, and a mind map.
Streaming Media
- Henry David Thoreau: An American EccentricHenry David Thoreau: An American Eccentric recognizes the two-hundred-year birth of Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) and celebrates this American non-conformist's life. The program offers insight and awareness into Thoreau's reading habits and writing stratagems. Several Thoreau authorities and scholars including: Professor Philip McFarland; actor historian Richard Smith; Professor T.C. Boyle; Professor Richard H. Baker, and James H. Bride, documentarian share their insights relating to Thoreau's unconventional literary vitality. Professor McFarland elucidates how Thoreau's contemporary Concord townsfolk observed his eccentric behavior and life style. On location at Walden Pond, Richard Smith, actor and historian, reenacts several experiences from Thoreau's years to include: Thoreau's daily life; Thoreau's Journal entries; Thoreau's spiritual influences and Thoreau's enduring reputation.
Author's Works & Perspectives
Walden and Civil Disobedience
ENDURING LITERATURE ILLUMINATED BY PRACTICAL SCHOLARSHIP Naturalist and philosopher Thoreau's timeless essays on the role of humanity -- in the world of nature, and in society and government. EACH ENRICHED CLASSIC EDITION INCLUDES: * A concise introduction that gives readers important background information * A chronology of the author's life and work * A timeline of significant events that provides the book's historical context * An outline of key themes and plot points to help readers form their own interpretations * Detailed explanatory notes * Critical analysis, including contemporary and modern perspectives on the work * Discussion questions to promote lively classroom and book group interaction * A list of recommended related books and films to broaden the reader's experience Enriched Classics offer readers affordable editions of great works of literature enhanced by helpful notes and insightful commentary. The scholarship provided in Enriched Classics enables readers to appreciate, understand, and enjoy the world's finest books to their full potential. SERIES EDITED BY CYNTHIA BRANTLEY JOHNSON
Thoreau's Country
In 1977 David Foster took to the woods of New England to build a cabin with his own hands. Along with a few tools he brought a copy of the journals of Henry David Thoreau. Foster was struck by how different the forested landscape around him was from the one Thoreau described more than a century earlier. The sights and sounds that Thoreau experienced on his daily walks through nineteenth-century Concord were those of rolling farmland, small woodlands, and farmers endlessly working the land. As Foster explored the New England landscape, he discovered ancient ruins of cellar holes, stone walls, and abandoned cartways--all remnants of this earlier land now largely covered by forest. How had Thoreau's open countryside, shaped by ax and plough, divided by fences and laneways, become a forested landscape?Part ecological and historical puzzle, this book brings a vanished countryside to life in all its dimensions, human and natural, offering a rich record of human imprint upon the land. Extensive excerpts from the journals show us, through the vividly recorded details of daily life, a Thoreau intimately acquainted with the ways in which he and his neighbors were changing and remaking the New England landscape. Foster adds the perspective of a modern forest ecologist and landscape historian, using the journals to trace themes of historical and social change.Thoreau's journals evoke not a wilderness retreat but the emotions and natural history that come from an old and humanized landscape. It is with a new understanding of the human role in shaping that landscape, Foster argues, that we can best prepare ourselves to appreciate and conserve it today.From the journal:"I have collected and split up now quite a pile of driftwood--rails and riders and stems and stumps of trees--perhaps half or three quarters of a tree...Each stick I deal with has a history, and I read it as I am handling it, and, last of all, I remember my adventures in getting it, while it is burning in the winter evening. That is the most interesting part of its history. It has made part of a fence or a bridge, perchance, or has been rooted out of a clearing and bears the marks of fire on it...Thus one half of the value of my wood is enjoyed before it is housed, and the other half is equal to the whole value of an equal quantity of the wood which I buy."--October 20, 1855
Cape Cod
This new paperback edition of Henry D. Thoreau's compelling account of Cape Cod contains the complete, definitive text of the original. Introduced by American poet and literary critic Robert Pinsky--himself a resident of Cape Cod--this volume contains some of Thoreau's most beautiful writings. In the plants, animals, topography, weather, and people of Cape Cod, Thoreau finds "another world" Encounters with the ocean dominate this book, from the fatal shipwreck of the opening chapter to his later reflections on the Pilgrims' landing and reconnaissance. Along the way, Thoreau relates the experiences of fishermen and oystermen, farmers and salvagers, lighthouse-keepers and ship captains, as well as his own intense confrontations with the sea as he travels the land's outermost margins. Chronicles of exploration, settlement, and survival on the Cape lead Thoreau to reconceive the history of New England--and to recognize the parochialism of history itself.