Henry David Thoreau: A Life

Name: Henry David Thoreau: A Life
Author: Laura Walls
ISBN: 9780226344720

Laura Walls

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Henry David Thoreau: A Life

Laura Walls

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This biography captures the life and philosophy of Henry David Thoreau, an influential American thinker. 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 biography, Laura Dassow 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 Drawing on Thoreau's published and unpublished writings, Walls presents Thoreau in all his vigor, quirks and contradictions: the young man shattered by the sudden death of his brother; the ambitious Harvard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.

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