Thoreau, HENRY DAVID, a New England author, born in Concord, Massachusetts, July 12, 1817, and died there May 6, 1862. Copyright 1892 in U.S. Concord is a pretty rural village about 20 miles NW. of Boston, and is noted as having been the home of Emerson, the Alcotts, Hawthorne, and Thoreau, the latter, however, being the only one of the group born there. Thoreau's father, John Thoreau, was of French extraction. He was a merchant in Boston, and finally a lead-pencil maker in a small way in Concord, where he died in 1859. He is described as a small, deaf, and unobtrusive man, plainly clad, and minding his own business; very much in contrast with his wife, who was not small, nor unobtrusive, and who did not always succeed in confining her attention to her own business. Henry was the third of four children—John, Helen, Henry, and Sophia—all people of character and mark. 'To meet one of the Thoreaus,' says Mr Sanborn, the biographer of Henry, 'was not the same as to encounter any other person who might cross your path.' Helen and John were both teachers, and died comparatively young. Helen was evidently a fine nature. It was part of her earnings as teacher that helped to pay Henry's expenses at Harvard College, where he was graduated in 1837.
Henry did not distinguish himself in college. In his senior year he is said to have 'lost rank with his instructors by his indifference to the ordinary college motives for study.' After graduating he became a teacher, and was for a time employed in the academy at Concord where he had been a pupil. He seems to have begun his career as a lecturer when about twenty-one years of age, first appearing before the lyceum of his native village. He soon gave up teaching, and joined his father in making lead-pencils. But to this employment he did not stick. Having mastered the art, Emerson says, he had no further interest in it. He probably began his walks and studies of nature as the serious occupation of his life about this time—i.e. in 1838 or 1839. In August 1839 he made his voyage down the Concord and Merrimac rivers in company with his brother John. Out of this voyage came his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers, published ten years later. The Week is a collection of essays on religious literature and philosophical themes, tied together by a slight thread of travel. Thoreau early made the acquaintance of Emerson, and in 1841–43 was a member of his household, having charge of the garden and doing other work for his friend. When Emerson made his visit to England in 1847, Thoreau again lived with the Emerson family. In 1845 Thoreau borrowed Mr Alcott's axe, and went and built himself a shanty in the woods by Walden Pond on land owned by Mr Emerson. He went there, he said, for seclusion and solitude that he might the better study nature and become acquainted with himself. Here he seems to have written much of the Week, his essay on Cariyle, and many others of his papers. While here he demonstrated to himself that a man can support himself on less than $100 per year and have two-thirds of his time to himself. He spent nearly two years at Walden. He says: 'I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there.' Out of his experience has come his most popular book, Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854), one of the freshest and most stimulating books in American literature.
After the Walden episode he supported himself in various ways, such as a job here and there at whitewashing, gardening, fence-building, and land-surveying. He also had a call to lecture now and then, and he wrote for the current magazines. He made three trips to the Maine woods in 1846, 1853, and in 1857, where he saw and studied the moose and Indians. His papers which were the outcome of these trips were published in book form after his death (1864), and next to Walden form his most valuable and interesting volume. In 1850 he made a trip to Canada with his friend Ellery Channing, out of which trip came his posthumous volume, A Yankee in Canada (1866). Thoreau began to keep a daily journal of his walks and observations in 1835. These journals swelled to thirty volumes before he died, and are a complete record of what he saw and what he thought. They seem to have been written and revised with great care, and are rich in fine thoughts, graphic descriptions, and fresh natural history notes. Since his death three volumes have been published from them: Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881), Summer (1884), and Winter (1887). Thoreau died of consumption, sitting up in bed on a morning in early May, and as gently as if going to sleep. Since his death, beside the volumes already named, there have been published from his lectures and magazine articles Excursions in Field and Forest, with a biographical sketch by Emerson (1863), and Cape Cod (1865). In 1865 a volume of his letters was published under the title of Letters to Various Persons, which also included nine of his poems. Thoreau wrote a good many poems, but destroyed most of them on the advice of Emerson. His poetry was much more Emersonian than his prose. He was early brought under Emerson's influence, and in both his manners and his habit of mind that influence was marked. Yet his writings are crisp and tonic, and in the literature of New England perhaps rank second in importance to those of his illustrious neighbour and friend. See Lives by H. A. Page, F. B. Sanborn (1882), H. S. Salt (1890 and 1896).