Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau (born David Henry Thoreau on July 12th, 1817 with Concord in the Massachusetts with the the United States, deceased on May 6th, 1862 also with Concord) is a Essayiste, Philosophe, memorialist and American Poète. He is especially known for Walden , his reflections on a simple life far from technology, in wood, like for civil Disobedience , where he argues the idea of an individual resistance to a government considered to be often unjust.

The books, articles, tests, newspapers and poetries of Thoreau fill out twenty volumes. Among his most important contributions one finds his writings on the Natural history and philosophy, where it anticipates the ecology and the environmental history, two of the sources of the environnementalism of today.

It was free trade all its life, making conferences tackling the laws governing the escaped and captured slaves, renting the work of Wendell Philips and the abolitionist John Brown. Its philosophy of nonviolent resistance will influence later the thought and the actions of figures such as Tolstoï, Gandhi and Martin Luther King.

Biography

In 1817, is born David Henry Thoreau, wire of John and Cynthia (born Dunbar) and the third of the four children of the couple. His/her paternal grandfather is of French origin , born with Jersey. His/her paternal grandfather, Asa Dunbar, played a part in the Rébellion of bread and butter in Harvard in 1766, the first demonstration of students of the history of the United States. David Henry is named in honor of a paternal uncle recently deceased, David Thoreau. He will become Henry David only after his academic years, though he never asked an official name change. He had an elder brother and a sister, Helen and John Jr, and a younger sister, Sophia. The house where Thoreau was born still exists, on Virginia Road , and is in the center of efforts for its safeguarding. The house is the same one, but it was moved of approximately 90 meters of its site of origin.

Bronson Alcott note in its newspaper that Thoreau pronounced its family name, stressing the first syllable and not the second, as it is generally today marked in the United States. A found alternative with Concord is, the pronunciation of the word thorough in American English. Seemingly physical it was rather average, with a nose which it called my feature more prominent . Nathaniel Hawthorne will write: is ugly, with the long nose, the strange mouth, the rustic manners and louts though courteous, corresponding very well to its external appearance. But its ugliness is nevertheless honest and pleasant, and him becoming better than the beauty .

The Thoreau family settles the following year with Chelmsford, in the Massachusetts. In 1821, Thoreau move in with Boston, where David Henry enters soon to the school. 1822 is the year of its discovery of the pond of Walden, whereas it remains in his grandmother.

Henry is allowed with the Academy of Concord in 1828. It learns there Latin, the Greek and French. In 1833, stock-broker, it follows the courses to the Université Harvard. He discovers the Transcendantalisme in 1835. In 1837, Thoreau obtains its diploma of Harvard. He makes this day a speech against the company. A legend says that he would have refused to pay the five dollars necessary for the diploma; actually, the master that he refuses to buy did not have any academic merit: the university offered it to the students who proved their physical health while being alive three years after having obtained its license, and by their economies, their expenditure, or by inheriting quality or condition by having five dollars to give to the university .

It stops its studies in 1835 to teach in an elementary school of Canton. He teaches then as a professor at the public school of Concord, but resigns after one week by hostility with the corporal punishments, then into force. He opens the following year - helped of his/her John brother - a private school at his place. They incorporate several progressive concepts in their school program, of which visits with the local stores. This project of school is abandoned when his/her John brother dies of the Tétanos on January 12th, 1842.

It becomes acquainted with Ralph Waldo Emerson and becomes transcendantalist - Thoreau is a disciple of its friend Emerson, who makes known to him a circle of authors and local thinkers, of which Ellery Channing, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne and its son Julian, then child. Several writers living Concord, Thoreau was the only native. With the encouragement of Emerson and Fuller, he writes in the review transcendantalist The Dial as of 1842; its first works published is there the natural history of Massachusetts , critical half of book and half test of natural history. It consisted of passages of its newspaper, which it had started to write on a suggestion of Emerson. The first thing that it writing is there a passage dated October 22nd, 1837 which starts with “ “What you make now? ” , it requires. “do you Write a diary? ” Alors I write my first passage in this newspaper. ”

Thoreau is a philosopher of nature and human condidtion. To its beginnings it follows the current transcendantalist of Emerson, Fuller and Alcott. They said that the ideal spiritual state transcends the physique and the empirical one, and that one can reach this idea by personal intuition and not by religious doctrines. According to them, nature is the sign external of an interior spirit, expressing radical correspondence of the visible things and the human thought , as Emerson written in its Natural book (1836).

From 1841 to 1844 Thoreau lives at Emerson to work as tutor of his children, leading assistant, and operates/garden. For a few months he lives in William Emerson with Staten Island, tutorant the children and writing for newspapers New Yorkean, helped leaves there by his future literary representative, Horace Greeley.

Thoreau turns over shortly after to Concord, where it starts to work in the factory of its family, manufacturing pencils; it will work there most of its life. It redécouvre the process to make a good pencil of lower Graphite by using the Clay like binder; this invention improves the graphite which one finds in New Hampshire since his discovery in 1821 per Charles Dunbar. Later, Thoreau changes the product of the factory; it consequently produces graphite for the ink of the machines of Typographie. The frequent contact with the negligible graphite particles could have damaged its lungs more than they were not it by the Tuberculose.

In April 1844 him and its friend Edward Hoar start by accident a fire which will devastate approximately 120 hectares of the wood of Walden, around the pond. He often speaks to buy or rent a farm, which he thought of giving him enough of incomes as loneliness to write its first book.

He decides to begin an experiment which will last two years. He wants to live simply and alone in wood. With Emerson, as well as other friends, it manufactures a hut in pine on banks of the pond of Walden (to approximately 2,4 km of its native house), in which it sleeps as of the night of the July 4th 1845.

The 24 or on July 25th, 1846, it meets the debt collector of rates, Sam Staples, who asks him to pay six years of taxes. Thoreau refuses and is arrested and imprisoned during one night, because he refuses to pay his taxes in a State which admits the Esclavage and makes the war with the Mexico. He was slackened the next day against his liking, his aunt having paid the taxes in his place. This event will have a major impact on Thoreau. In January and February 1848 it makes conference on Rights and duties of the individual in relation with the government with the Concord Lyceum . Alcott there will be and write on these conferences in its diary.

Thoreau will rewrite and modify the text of its conference for its book civil Disobedience , published in May 1849 by Elizabeth Peabody in its Esthetic Papers .

It supplements the first draft of has Week one the Concord and Merrimack Rivers , a reduced dedicated to his John brother, describing their voyage to the White Montagnes in 1839. It does not find an editor wanting to publish this work, but Emerson encourages it to publish it on its own account, which Thoreau made with the editor of Emerson, Munroe. Munroe does little publicity for the book, which thus does not sell well. This failure will create debts very hard to pay for Thoreau, and the council of Emerson, at the origin of these problems, will make move away the two friends.

In August 1846, Thoreau leaves a little Walden to go to the Mont Katahdin in Maine, voyage reported later in the first chapter of The Maine Woods , Ktaadn .

It leaves the pond of Walden and its hut on September 6th, 1847 and works in the following years to pay its debts and to revise its manuscript continuously. In 1849 his/her Helen sister, reached Tuberculosis, dies.

In 1851 it becomes more and more fascinated with the natural history and the books speaking about voyages or forwardings. It reads many books on the Botanique and often writes its observations above in its diary. He admires William Bartram like Charles Darwin and the Voyage of the Beagle . He observes and notes nature around him in the wood of Concord, describing time which take the fruits to mature with the pronfondor fluctuating of the pond and the dates of the migrations of certain birds. He wanted thus to anticipate seasons of nature.

He becomes expert geometrician, and continuous to write his detailed observations of the nature of his town of 67, a document which will reach the two million words, that he will hold during twenty-four years. He holds also a series of notebooks which will be the base of its writings on the natural history, of which Autumnal Tints , The Sucession off Trees , and Wild After , a test on the destruction of species of local Pomme S.

He helps of the slaves in their escape towards the Canada during the year 1853. He gives finally the seventh version of Walden to the editor Tichnor and Fields, who is published in 1854, and which tells the two years, two months and two days spent in the forest in the neighborhoods of the banks of the pond of Walden, not far from his/her friends and of his family, in Concord. The book is one big hit. The book compresses these two years in only one, using the four seasons passage like symbol of the development of oneself.

He travels to the Quebec once, the Cape Cod four times and to Maine three times; these landscapes will inspire its books has Yankee in Canada , Cape Cod , and The Maine Woods , in which he speaks about the geography, the history and philosophy. Other voyages will take it along in Philadelphia and to New York in 1854, then with the area of the Big lakes in 1861 (he will visit the Chutes the Niagara, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, Saint Paul and the island Mackinac).

In 1859, Thoreau pronounces a plea for John Brown in Concord, Boston and Worcester, disgusted by the fact that many personalities of the free trade movement had disavowed it following its raid with Harpers Ferry; this plea will be published under the title of has Plea for Captain John Brown . It will succeed in making change idea many people, and the movement will accept Brown as martyr of their cause; during the American Civil War the troops of North will rent the courage of Brown in several songs.

Thoreau supports the cause Végétarienne, which he regards as an ideal to reach but this mode would not have even practiced to him assiduously.

It catches the Tuberculose in 1835 and will suffer from it for all its life. In 1859 it with the Bronchitis following an excursion of night to count the rings of the chicots of trees fallen after a storm. Its health worsens in the three following years, with briefs re-establishments, until it is confined to bed. Realizing that it was at its last days, Thoreau spends the last years of its life to revise and publish its works not yet published, particlièrement Excursions and The Maine Woods , as to require publishers to republish has Week one the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Walden . He writes letters and maintains his diary until he became too frail to continue it. His/her friends are astonished by his aspect extremely decreased and fascinated by its quiet acceptance of death. When his/her aunt Louisa asks him in the last weeks of her life if it had made its peace with God, Thoreau answers him quite simply I did not know that one had disputed. He dies on May 6th, 1862 at the 44 years age.

At the origin buried in the family vault on the maternal side (Dunbar), him and his/her immediate parents are transferred to the cemetery from Sleepy Hollow, also in Concord. Emerson will pronounce the funeral praise.

Ellery Channing, a friend of Thoreau, will publish the first biography which is devoted to him, Thoreau the Poet-Naturalist , in 1873. He and another friend, Harrison Blake, will publish some poems, tests and pieces of its diary for posthumous publication during the years 1890 (Blake maintained a regular correspondence with Thoreau March 1848 in May 1861). The diary of Thoreau, often used in other works on him or of him, will be published only in 1906.

There exists an international association dedicated to the study of its works, the Thoreau Society.

Influences

The writings of Thoreau had an important radiation after its death. Political leaders such as the Mahatma Gandhi, the president John F. Kennedy, the militant of the civic rights Martin Luther King, William O. Douglas and of the writers as Leon Tolstoï evoked all the influence of the work of Thoreau in their action, in particular that of Civil Disobedience. Of other characters of the world of arts and the letters was inspired by him such as Edward Abbey, Willa Cather, Marcel Proust, William Butler Yeats, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, E.B. White and Frank Lloyd Wright or of the naturalists like John Burroughs, John Muir, E.O. Wilson, Edwin Way Teale, Joseph Wood Krutch and David Brower. The anarchistic feminist Emma Goldman also appreciated the ideas of Thoreau and regarded it as the “larger American anarchist”.

Mahatma Gandhi lute for the first time Walden in 1906 when he fought for the civic rights to Johannesburg in South Africa. He entrusted to the American journalist Webb Miller: ideas influenced me greatly. I adopted nap off them and recommended the study off Thoreau to all off my friends who were helping me in the causes Indian Independence off. Why I actually took the name off my movement from Thoreau' S essay “One the Duty off Civil Disobedience,” written butt 80 years ago . The Ascétisme practiced by Gandhi was inspired much the thought by the American poet.

Criticisms

Thoreau had also critical people of its style, of which the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson, which found Thoreau effeminatized to want to live simply in nature, far from the modern society. George Eliot judged these criticisms without imagination and skimped. Throughout the 19th century, Thoreau will be often rejected like one grumpy provincial hostile with material progress. But republished in France in the Sixties, its work knows an renewed interest at the time of the movement of May 68. One since then quotes it like a major influence of the movements environmentalist, vegetarian and counter-culture in general.

Appendices

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