David thoreau biography
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Henry David Thoreau
1. Life and Writings
Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts in and died there in , at the age of forty-four. Like that of his contemporary Søren Kierkegaard, Thoreau’s intellectual career unfolded in a close and polemical relation to the town in which he spent almost his entire life. After graduating from Harvard in , he struck up a friendship with fellow Concord resident Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose essay “Nature” he had first encountered earlier that year. Although the two American thinkers had a turbulent relationship due to serious philosophical and personal differences, they had a profound and lasting effect upon one another. It was in the fall of that Thoreau made his first entries in the multivolume journal he would keep for the rest of his life. Most of his published writings were developed from notes that first appeared on these pages, and Thoreau subsequently revised many entries, suggesting that his journal can be consider
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Thoreau's Life
Thoreau&#;s Life
by Richard J. Schneider
Henry David Thoreau () was born and lived nearly all his life in Concord, Massachusetts, a small town about twenty miles west of Boston. He received his education at the public school in Concord and at the private Concord Academy. Proving to be a better scholar than his more fun-loving and popular elder brother John, he was sent to Harvard. He did well there and, despite having to drop out for several months for financial and health reasons, was graduated in the top half of his class in
Thoreau&#;s graduation came at an inauspicious time. In , America was experiencing an economic depression and jobs were not plentiful. Furthermore, Thoreau found han själv temperamentally unsuited for three of the four usual professions open to Harvard graduates: the ministry, the law, and medicine. The fourth, teaching, was one he felt comfortable with, since both of his elder siblings, Helen and John, were already teachers. He wa
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Henry David Thoreau
American philosopher (–)
"Thoreau" redirects here. For other uses, see Thoreau (disambiguation).
Henry David Thoreau (July 12, &#;&#; May 6, ) was an American naturalist, essayist, poet, and philosopher.[2] A leading transcendentalist,[3] he is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay "Civil Disobedience" (originally published as "Resistance to Civil Government"), an argument in favor of citizen disobedience against an unjust state.
Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry amount to more than 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions are his writings on natural history and philosophy, in which he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern-day environmentalism. His literary style interweaves close observation of natur, personal experience, pointed rhetoric, symbolic meanings, and historical lore, w