Henry David Thoreau: A Life

Laura Dassow Walls

Jun 2017 · University of Chicago Press

About this ebook

This acclaimed biography captures the inspiring life and philosophy of an influential American thinker: “a moving portrait of a brilliant, complex man” (The New York Times).

Henry David Thoreau’s attempt to “live deliberately” in the woods outside his hometown of Concord, Massachusetts, has inspired individualists since the publication of Walden in 1854. But there was much more to Thoreau than his brief experiment in living at Walden Pond. A member of the intellectual circle centered on his neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson, he was also an ardent naturalist, a manual laborer and inventor, a radical political activist, and more. In this acclaimed biography, Laura Dassow Walls goes further than any previous Thoreau scholar to capture the man in all his profound, inspiring complexity.

Walls traces the full arc of Thoreau’s life, beginning with his early days in the intellectual hothouse of Concord, when the American experiment was “a family affair, earned by one generation and about to pass to the next.” By the time he died in 1862, at only forty-four years of age, Thoreau had witnessed the transformation of his world from a community of farmers and artisans into a bustling, interconnected commercial nation.

Drawing on Thoreau’s published and unpublished writings, Walls presents Thoreau in all his vigor, quirks and contradictions: the young man shattered by the sudden death of his brother; the ambitious Harvard College student; the ecstatic visionary who closed Walden with an account of the regenerative power of the Cosmos. We meet the man whose belief in human freedom made him an uncompromising abolitionist; and the passionate naturalist, who, long before the age of environmentalism, saw tragedy for future generations in the human heedlessness around him.

About the author

Laura Dassow Walls is the William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. She lives in Granger, IN.