During the summer of 1861 he traveled to Minnesota in a vain effort to recover his health. His lungs had long been tubercular, and Thoreau was housebound for many weeks. While counting tree rings on 3 December 1860 Thoreau contracted a cold that quickly worsened into bronchitis. The following year Thoreau lectured to his townsmen on “ The Succession of Forest Trees,” and his lecture was shortly afterward published and republished, receiving wider circulation than any of Thoreau’s other writings during his lifetime and cementing his reputation as a naturalist. John Brown” was published and widely circulated in his friend, the famous editor Horace Greeley’s newspaper, The New-York Tribune. John Brown raided the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, and Thoreau spoke mightily in defense of Brown’s character - the first person in America to do so. In October of that year the abolitionist Capt. In 18 he visited Cape Cod, the woods of Maine, and the White Mountains of New Hampshire and in the latter year he published what was to become the second chapter of The Maine Woods, his essay “Chesuncook.” In 1859 his father died, and as a result he had to begin assuming more responsibility of the family’s plumbago business. While there he visited Walt Whitman in nearby Brooklyn. In 1856 Thoreau traveled to Perth Amboy, New Jersey, to survey a large estate and deliver three lectures. His famous book Walden or, Life in the Woods(later shortened at his request to Walden) was published in 1854, and in that same year he delivered his lecture-essay “ Slavery in Massachusetts” at an Independence Day meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society. The following year he traveled to Quebec and wrote up that experience in a lecture titled “An Excursion to Canada,” partially published in 1853 as A Yankee in Canada. Thoreau made the first of four trips to Cape Cod in 1849, and he later delivered lectures about his experiences that were posthumously published as Cape Cod. At about this time he began the routine of morning and evening study and writing, and afternoon walks that were the foundation upon which he may be said to have built his creative life. Thoreau returned to his parent’s home in 1848 and continued living with them as a boarder for the remainder of his life. He later worked these experiences into lectures that were later still published as the “ Ktaadn” chapter of The Maine Woods and the famous, influential essay “ Civil Disobedience.” Thoreau’s survey of Walden Pond, 1846Īfter leaving the house at the pond Thoreau stayed with the Emerson family again while Ralph Waldo Emerson lectured in England. Katahdin while on a visit to the Maine woods and spent one night in jail for refusing to pay his poll tax. In 1846, while still at the pond, he climbed to the summit of Mt. Having returned to Concord, in 1844 Thoreau and Edward Hoar, a companion, accidentally set fire to some woods in Concord when trying to prepare a fish chowder near Fair Haven Pond on a windy day.įrom 1845 to 1847 Thoreau lived in a small house that he built himself on the shore of Walden Pond, a mile and a half south of Concord Center. In 1842 John, Jr., died a painful death of lockjaw in Thoreau’s arms, and the following year Thoreau moved to Staten Island, New York, to tutor William Emerson’s children and to attempt to break into the New York literary market. In 1840 Thoreau published poems and essays in the transcendentalist periodical, The Dial, and from 1841 to 1843 he lived with the famous author and lecturer Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emerson’s family in Concord. From 1838 until 1841 he and his older brother John, Jr., taught a private school in Concord, and in 1839 the two brothers went on a two week boating excursion that Thoreau later memorialized in his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, published in 1849. In 1828, after a few years in Concord’s grammar school, Thoreau began attending the Concord Academy, and from 1833 to 1837 he attended Harvard College.Īfter graduating from Harvard Thoreau secured a teaching position at the Concord Center School (public), but he resigned after just two weeks because he refused to use corporal punishment on his charges. Thoreau was born to John and Cynthia (Dunbar) Thoreau in Concord, Massachusetts, on 12 July 1817. The American writer, thinker, and naturalist Henry D. Photographer: Herbert Gleason (1855-1937) The Thoreau Log: A Digital Documentary Life of Henry D.News from The Walden Woods Project Farm.The Transcendentalists: Their Lives & Writings.
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