who was Henry David Thoreau?

Question

who was Henry David Thoreau?

Answer 1

1

Answer 2

Many have been entranced by Thoreau's idyllic picture of Walden Pond. In the 60's, a lot of young people formed communes with ideas similar to those expressed by Thoreau. I've known many of them personally and very few of them saw this as wasted effort. Living a hard, simple life with solitude an available commodity has a real quality of life about it that most gained. It replaced a life style that was highly fantasized with unreal values with a simple life where values were much like those experienced by the pre-industrial agrarian societies which they sought to emulate. I see no reason why you could not try such an experiment but it would probably be wise to learn as much as you can about how life was lived in those simpler times. I wish you well and, if you attempt this, I wish you a rich and rewarding experience.

Answer 3

I am not sure that he did change the way people think of the environment. He actually lived and wrote before the environment became a hot issue. 1817-1862. He wrote a book titled "Walden" that told of the time he spent on Walden Pond living a simple life. He also wrote several other books. "Civil Disobedience", "Walking", "John Brown", and "Slavery in Massachuttes".



It is true that environmentalists of today think of Thoreau as their champion, base on his book "Walden" in which he described living his simple life. He lived on Walden Pond for only a little over 2 years, but the book he wrote became a modern day classic.

Answer 4

Thoreau was a Trancendentalist thinker and writer who lived in the 19th century. He wrote the book WALDEN where he expressed his philosophy. He said he went to the woods to live life simply and to reflect and think about the meaning of life. "Simplify, simplify, simplify," he said. He spent much time at Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, where wrote and reflected upon life.



He was a very close friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson whose Transcendental views are best expressed in his essay NATURE. Emerson philosophized while Thoreau lived the theories they both believed in.



Once Thoreau went to jail because he refused to pay taxes to a government that supported slavery. Emerson visiting Thoreau asked him, "Henry, what are you doing in there?" Thoreau's reply was a classic. "No, Ralph, the real question is what the hell are you doing out there?"

Answer 5

umm

Answer 6

Henry David Thoreau was the man who said "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it it because he did not do his own homework."

Answer 7

He was a thinker who would sit in the woods and write and think about nature and his part in it.

Answer 8

David Henry Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, to John and Cynthia Thoreau. He was named after a recently deceased paternal Uncle, David Thoreau. He didn't change his name to "Henry David" until he had graduated from Harvard, although he never petitioned the government to do so officially. He had two older siblings, Helen and John Jr., and a younger sister, Sophia. [1]



Bronson Alcott notes in his journal that Thoreau pronounced his family name THOR-eau, stress on the first syllable, not the last, a common error today. A Concord variant is THUR-eau, like the English word "thorough." In appearance he was homely, with a nose that he called "my most prominent feature".[Cape Cod] Of his face, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote: "[Thoreau] is as ugly as sin, long-nosed, queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and rustic, though courteous manners, corresponding very well with such an exterior. But his ugliness is of an honest and agreeable fashion, and becomes him much better than beauty." [2]



Thoreau studied at Harvard between 1833 and 1837, majoring in English. Today, an equivalent degree would be in comparative literature. Legends state that Thoreau refused to pay a five-dollar fee for a Harvard diploma. In fact, the Masters' degree he declined to purchase had no academic merit: Harvard College offered it to graduates "who proved their physical worth by being alive three years after graduating, and their saving, earning, or inheriting quality or condition by having Five Dollars to give the college." (Thoreau's Diploma) His comment was Let every sheep keep its own skin.



Upon graduation, he returned home, where he became a companion of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson took a strong paternal, and sometimes patronizing liking to Thoreau, and delighted advising the young man and introducing him into his social circle, which consisted of some of the most important American writers and thinkers of the period including Ellery Channing, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, and Nathaniel Hawthorne and his son Julian (at that time only a boy). Of the many esteemed authors who made their home at Concord, he was the only town native. Emerson referred to him as THE man of Concord.



Emerson constantly pushed Thoreau to contribute essays and poems to the transcendentalist magazine, The Dial, but editor Margaret Fuller consented to publish Thoreau's work only after pressure from Emerson. His first work to garner any praise was Natural History of Massachusetts half book review, half natural history essay published in The Dial in 1842. Like most of his works, the essay was mostly made up of observations Thoreau had made in his journal. Thoreau had begun keeping a journal in 1837 at Emerson's suggestion. His first entry on October 22, 1837 reads, "'What are you doing now?' he [Emerson] asked. 'Do you keep a journal?' So I make my first entry today."



Thoreau was a philosopher of nature and its relation to the human condition. In his early years, he accepted the ideas of Transcendentalism, an eclectic idealist philosophy advocated by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Bronson Alcott. Transcendentalism was naturalistic and mystical, rejecting deterministic Calvinism. It was inspired by Swedenborg, Kant, Buddhism, Hinduism, and other non-Christian sources. It was not atheistic, but Unitarian and thus did not see Jesus as divine.



Thoreau worked in his father's pencil workshop in 1837-1838. He and his brother John, opened a Grammar School in Concord in 1838, teaching there until John became fatally ill in 1841.[3] In 1841 he was invited to live in the Emerson household, where he lived sporadically until 1843 working as an all-around handyman, gardener, and assistant to Emerson. He spent a few months of 1843 in New York, serving as a tutor to William Emerson's sons, and attempting to break into the New York publishing industry.[4]