Contents Introduction Main part

A Week was published, at Thoreau’s own expense, in 1849. To his dismay the book was not well received and many copies went unsold. As demonstrated in A Week, Thoreau was a serious student of Eastern religion and philosophy. He was especially drawn to the Vedanta teachings of the Bhagavad Gita. He had taken Emerson’s copy of the book with him to the pond .
His signature achievement as a writer is Walden, which finally appeared in 1854 after numerous revisions. The book condensed his two-year stay at the pond into one cycle of the seasons, from summer to the following spring. The symbolism of the seasons is meant to suggest a process of spiritual awakening and rebirth in keeping with what he and the Transcendentalists termed self-culture, or the cultivation of the soul [9,73].
With the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1851 Thoreau became increasingly strident in his attacks on the government. He delivered an incendiary speech, “Slavery in Massachusetts,” in 1854. His most controversial and consequential anti-slavery addresses were those in defense of John Brown. Along with Emerson’s defense of Brown, Thoreau’s plea was widely reported in the press, causing a rift between the Northern and Southern wings of the Democratic Party, allowing Lincoln to win the election of 1860.
During the last ten years of Thoreau’s life his voluminous journals were increasingly devoted to cataloging observations of flora and fauna on his daily walks. These provided the substance of two major books published long after his death, Faith in a Seed and Wild Fruits.
Following one of his walks in December 1860 he came down with a severe cold which developed into bronchitis and eventually into acute tuberculosis. Realizing that his time was limited he began to prepare a number of his lectures for publication. The Maine Woods and Cape Cod, both of which were based on trips he had taken to these areas, appeared within two years of his death.
Thoreau’s reputation as a writer and thinker developed slowly. Though his books remained in print he was viewed primarily as a nature writer with a limited audience. His social and philosophical issues were not initially popular in this country. The civil rights era and the Vietnam War brought Thoreau’s more radical political thoughts to the fore. Concern for the environment and wilderness preservation have made Thoreau’s ideas on these matters increasingly relevant.
Transcendentalism was a movement in the early to mid- 19 century that embraced new ideas in literature, religion, and culture. It was a protest to intellectualism and the doctrine of the Unitarian Church. It was a belief that people can reach a spiritual state by utilizing their intuition, and not by learned doctrines and religious teachings. Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was an American from New England who was an author, poet, and natural philosopher. Thoreau was a leading figure in the Transcendentalist movement which held on staying at Walden pond, that the human connection with nature is necessary for intellectual and moral stability. Through his writings, Thoreau was able to impart his beliefs on how people should live in order to transcend the materialistic world. By living simply and without many material goods, a person can be in the world, but not of the world. By using the influence of Emerson, Thoreau became one of the leading influences of the transcendentalist movement [5,87].
Thoreau undertook to perform some land management tasks for Emerson such as clearing undergrowth and planting trees but he also arranged his affairs such that he had to work only a little at a time for his upkeep, and he kept a broad margin to his life for reading, thinking, walking, observing, and writing.
Thoreau's older brother, John, had suddenly died of Tetanus in 1842 and this fatalty had had a very deep personal impact on him. Thoreau set out to write a work in memory of his brother by attempting to set down something of their experiences in their canoe trip of 1839. This work was eventually titled "A week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers" and was to become Thoreau's first published full length work in 1849.
In 1846 Thoreau began writing about his experiences living relatively simply, and idyllically, in a roughly fashioned small house set beside a lake in his work "Walden". On page 69 we read:
Thoreau's work is skeptical about the real benefits of long hours spent working and also skeptical about the real benefits of economic development itself. For Thoreau it seemed that such development should be justified by having a clear moral or intellectual purpose. Walden also depicts more intensively farmed pasturelands as being devoid of flowers - farm animals are held to be more prone to disease whilst the men who looked after them are held to be likely to be caught up in a mire of manure and exhaustion.
During his residence beside Walden Pond Thoreau was by no means isolated from society. The lake was, to some extent, a resort area for the townsfolk. Thoreau took a keen interest in current affairs, made frequent visits to family, friends, and neighbours, and supported himself by doing odd jobs, such as gardening and carpentry, alongside a locally significant role in land surveying [6,91].
In July 1846, when Thoreau went into town to have a pair of shoes repaired, he was arrested for non-payment of the poll tax assessed against every voter and associated with a Mexican-American War. Thoreau spent a night in jail. He was released the next day, after one of his relatives, probably an aunt, paid what was owed. Thoreau clarified his position in perhaps his most famous essay, "Civil Disobedience" (1849), now widely referred to by its original title, "Resistance to Civil Government." In this essay Thoreau discussed passive resistance as a method of protest. Thoreau's position in relation to such a decision to indulge in Civil Disobedience depended to a large extent on the belief in the reliability of the human conscience that was a fundamental Transcendentalist principle. This belief being based upon a conviction of the immanence, or indwelling, of God in the soul of the individual.
Thoreau resided again in Emerson's house from September 1847, (helping out whilst Emerson was on a trip to Europe). He also became more fully involved after 1847 with the family trade of making lead pencils. The Thoreau pencils were very highly regarded for their quality. Thoreau spent the years from 1849 with his parents and sister in Concord [7,57].
In 1849 Thoreau, for the first time, saw one of his major works in print.
Of the original print run of one thousand copies of "A week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers", for which Thoreau had agreed as a new author to receive no royalties, less than three hundred were sold during the first four years.
With the introduction of electrotyping printing processes in the 1850's the Thoreau family business diversified into supplying raw materials for that trade. Thoreau eventually ran the company after his father's death in 1859. The earlier and later involvements in the sometimes dusty production of lead pencils did serious damage to Thoreau's lungs.
The major portion of Thoreau's time was however devoted to study, to meditation and to conversation. His graduation from Harvard had brought with it life-time borrowing privileges at Harvard College Library.
In 1854 Thoreau's "Walden" was published and managed to fare rather better in terms of sales than his first work. Since these times "Walden" has been printed in over two hundred different editions in English besides being translated into some fifty other languages for publication. It is said to have been an inspiration to such persons as Tolstoy, Ghandhi, and Martin Luther King besides whilst also being an inspiration for environmentalism across the world.
In the second chapter entitled "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For," Thoreau wrote, "Men esteem truth remote, in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star ... In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here. God himself culminates in the present moment ... And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us." By living intimately with nature at Walden, Thoreau hoped to attain to higher transcendental truth.
There were many movements for change (e.g. transcendentalism, women's role in society, the utopian Brook Farm community) during Thoreau's lifetime but he declined serious involvement in most of these. The Abolition of Slavery was something of an exception however as Thoreau delivered several lectures in opposition to the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law. It is accepted that Thoreau assisted fugitive slaves to be sheltered from capture, in several cases through concealment in the Thoreau home, and further assisted in organising relocations to Canada [9,72].
In October 1859 after the abolitionist Capt. John Brown raided the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Thoreau spoke in defence of Brown's character - the first person in America to do so. His essay "A Plea for Capt. John Brown" was published and widely circulated in The New York Tribune. The editor of this newspaper, Horace Greeley, was a friend of Thoreau's who also maintained other friendships in Transcendentalist circles.
Henry David Thoreau was only forty five years of age at the time of his death from Tuberculosis in May 1862. His remains are interred his family's plot at Authors' Ridge in Sleepy Hollow cemetery in Concord. Bronson Alcott, a Transcendentalist friend of Thoreau's and superintendent of Concord's schools, arranged for the closing of the schools on the day of the burial and several hundred persons were in attendance.
Of the lengthier volumes that are included in the collected works of Thoreau, only two were published during his lifetime: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (being an account of the canoe trip of 1839) and Walden; or, Life in the Woods (Boston 1854). The material for most of the other volumes was edited after Thoreau's death by friends from his journals, manuscripts, and letters.

Such edited collections of Thoreau's writings include Excursions (Boston 1863), which contains the well-known essay "Walking;" The Maine Woods (1864); Cape Cod (1865); and A Yankee in Canada (1866). In 1993 Faith in a Seed appeared, a previously unpublished collection of Thoreau's natural-history writings featuring the essay "The Dispersion of Seeds."