[balti]

1. Biographical Information

Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts to a close-knit family. Within his house were his mother, father, two sisters, and brother. To help supplement their income, the Thoreau family took in boarders, and Thoreau helped out at his father’s pencil factory. Outside of brief excursions, most of Thoreau’s life was spent in and around Concord, and with the exception of his time living at Ralph Waldo Emerson’s house and in New York City as a tutor, Thoreau remained at home until his death at the age of forty-four from tuberculosis.

He was born during a period of rapid changes in the United States. Thoreau lived during the early phases of the American Industrial Revolution and the rise of populous textile mills at the confluence of the Concord and Merrimack rivers and up and down the Merrimack River; he lived during the rise of the telegraph; he lived during the time of westward expansion, the California gold rush, the Mexican-American War, and staunch resistance to slavery from the abolitionists. While all these play an important role in his texts, Thoreau chose the railroad as an enigmatic presence and force in New England.

The railroad was extending across the United States, and its whistle penetrated the recesses of the woods around Concord. In Walden, Thoreau writes, “The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods summer and winter, sounding like the scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer’s yard, informing me that many restless city merchants are arriving within the circle of the town, or adventurous country traders from the other side” (115). In A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), Thoreau describes a similar phenomenon, but with more emphasis on the railroad’s undesirable effects on the natural world: “Instead of the scream of a fish-hawk scaring the fishes, is heard the whistle of the steam-engine arousing a country to its progress” (87). The train explicitly represents great power, technological innovation, the rule of commerce, and cultural progress, but it also carries the connotation of the displacement of animals, the destruction of the natural world, and the pernicious powers of the market. For Thoreau, therefore, “progress” was an ambiguous term; while the majority of Americans could honor this word, Thoreau recognized the constraints of capitalist democracy, and he was concerned about where a market-based culture was going to lead the nation and just how harmful “progress” could be.

He saw the unfavorable consequences of the market not only in the natural world, but the changes in human communities, and the diminishment of life worried him.

Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day; he cannot afford to sustain the manliest relations to men; his labor would be depreciated in the market. He has no time to be anything but a machine. (Thoreau 6)

America’s market society was generating a level of artificiality in life and cultivating a desire for the accumulation of goods. A consumer society is based on the ability to create a desire for new products; to maintain this high level of dependence on material goods, people have to work more. These artificial cares, or desires for unneeded goods, diminished the time available for rejuvenating activities and quality interpersonal relations. In a society of technological advancement and the increased use of machines, human beings were beginning to become more mechanized. They were machines guided by the timetable of the market and robotic laborers doing unsatisfying jobs.

To counteract this dehumanizing process, Thoreau chose to make his life an example of simple living and his writings fruits of his countercultural lifestyle. Within this context, he is probably best known for his experiment at Walden Pond. This was his personal declaration of independence. Obtaining approval from Emerson to build a cabin on Emerson’s land, Thoreau built a ten-by-fifteen-foot cabin on the shores of Walden Pond. For two years, two months, and two days from July 4, 1845 to September 6, 1847, Thoreau dedicated his life to frugality and writing the only two books published during his lifetime: A Week and Walden. His townspeople persistently inquired why he chose to live aloof from society, and Thoreau gave his answer in a famous passage in the second chapter of Walden: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear, nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life . . .” (90-91). He partially withdrew from society, so he could experience life more directly, being able to confront it on its simplest terms. In doing so, Thoreau wanted to “suck out all the marrow of life,” which means he sought to ingest the vitality at the core of life itself—as “marrow” signified the best aspect of an entity. His withdrawal, then, concerned living more fully and as simply as possible.

Despite his serious efforts to be an accomplished writer, Thoreau’s writings, generally, were not warmly received. In 1849, he had to publish A Week with his own money, and Thoreau remained in debt to the publisher for several years. Walden, which was published in 1854, was more warmly received, but generally throughout his life, people did not see Thoreau as an accomplished author. It was not until years later, around the beginning of the twentieth century, when people started to appreciate Thoreau more, and Houghton Mifflin Co. helped to solidify his reputation in 1906 when the company published his books, essays, and journals, which totaled twenty volumes. Since 1906, Thoreau’s reputation as a literary figure has grown, and he has become an important intellectual figure for environmental movements.

The Transcendentalist movement, which was an intellectual, social, and religious movement of loosely gathered, like-minded individuals in and around Boston and Concord, helped to cultivate Thoreau’s intellectual pursuits. During his years at Harvard College, Thoreau had read Emerson’s Nature (1836), which he withdrew from the library on two occasions; Emerson’s book was one of the earliest expressions of New England Transcendentalism. Around the time of his graduation from college, he became better acquainted with Emerson personally, and they developed a type of mentoring friendship. While their relationship would decrease in intimacy and fondness later in life, the early support and inspiration Thoreau received from Emerson was crucial for Thoreau’s development as a writer. He had lived with Emerson from 1841 to 1843, for example, and this provided Thoreau with an environment that nurtured his writing and gave him the opportunity to interact intimately with Emerson’s wife and children. While serving as a handyman, Thoreau had access to Emerson’s library and Emerson’s supportive company, which sustained Thoreau’s hopes for authorial success.

For Thoreau, however, life and literature were not two distinct realms; in fact, he was accustomed to a way of seeing the world that merged different areas of study. He was comfortable with transgressing intellectual boundaries; this is seen most clearly, for example, in his study of the natural world. Thoreau was a land surveyor; in fact, he was one of the most accurate and trusted surveyors in, and around, the Concord area. He was accustomed to spending time outdoors, which was largely a daily routine and constituted hours of his day. Thoreau was fond of the natural world; arguably, one could see it as a type of romantic or friendly fondness. He studied nature intensively, such as documenting the date that specific flowers bloomed, the rise and fall of water levels, and the dispersion patterns of seeds.

At the time, this scientific outlook was called natural philosophy, and Thoreau often identified himself as a natural philosopher. This passion of his, however, went much deeper than science; he saw nature as an important part of the human context, so to study nature was to study humanity, too. This was not the only leap he would take to cross disciplinary boundaries. Math and poetry could be linked, nature and literature could be linked, and so could religion and politics. The important point for understanding Thoreau, then, is that study of all kinds should be integrated and assist pupils in living a freer, more responsible life marked by the quality, not the quantity, of life.

Outside of Walden, Thoreau is known best for his essay “Civil Disobedience.” This essay began as a lecture given on January 26 and February 16, 1848, and the original title was “The Rights and Duties of the Individual in Relation to Government.” When the essay was published in a journal called Aesthetic Papers in May 1849, Thoreau changed the title to “Resistance to Civil Government,” but it was not until 1866, four years after Thoreau’s death, that the essay would receive the new title of “Civil Disobedience.” This essay, arguably, provides one of the best starting points for Thoreau’s political philosophy and the best place to begin reading his other reform writings.

“Civil Disobedience” is also important, however, because it has played an important role in Thoreau’s global influence. While Thoreau’s influence on Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is exaggerated at times, it is clear that Thoreau’s essay and other writings provided Gandhi with a strategic advantage because of Thoreau’s place in American literature and because of Thoreau’s admiration for Hindu philosophy. Thoreau’s influence proceeded from Gandhi to Martin Luther King, Jr.; through his reading of Gandhi, King encountered Thoreau as a political ally for the struggle for liberation from segregation and racism. Today, Thoreau’s influence extends to environmentalism and struggles for human rights within the U.S. and beyond.