Henry David Thoreau

1817-1862

• Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1817. As a boy, he loved the woods and fields around his town.

• He entered Harvard in 1833 and graduated four years later.

• He never ranked higher than the middle of his class.• He was independent and eccentric, and he wore a

green coat to chapel “because the rules required black.”

• Thoreau seems to be the opposite of the great American self-made man. He, by his own choosing, became a self-UNMADE man.

• He lasted only two weeks as a schoolteacher (he quit, refusing to whip a child).

• The woman he proposed to turned him down.• He had little interest in the family business,

despite his Harvard education.

• At the age of 28, on July 4, 1845, he ended his three-year stay at the house of a friend and moved to a cabin on the shores of Walden Pond in Massachusetts.

• The experiment was an attempt to rediscover the grandeur and heroism inherent in a simple life led close to nature.

• One of Thoreau’s most famous remarks is: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

• What does he mean?

• Thoreau is also very famous for an act of civil disobedience.

• He refused to pay taxes to support the Mexican War, which he felt would extend American slave-owning territory.

• He was extremely opposed to slavery.• He spent the night in jail before someone paid

the tax for him.

• In 1861, Thoreau developed tuberculosis.• On his deathbed, his aunt asked him, “Have

you made your peace with God?” Thoreau replied, “Why, Aunt, I didn’t know we had ever quarreled.”