Riley Taylor Extra Credit LA 12-16-08

Henry David Thoreau

David Henry Thoreau was born on July 12, 1817 to John Thoreau and Cynthia Dunbar. Henry David was born in Concord, Massachusetts. His father was a pencil maker, whose father immigrated from France. His Mothers father was Asa Dunbar, who was known for leading the Rebellion of 1766, the "Butter Rebellion", at Harvard. This was the first recorded rebellion in the history of the United States. Henry was named after his Uncle, David Thoreau, who recently died. He did not become Henry David until after he graduated college, and he never petitioned for a name change legally.

He had three siblings, Helen Thoreau and John Jr. Thoreau (who were older than him), and one younger sibling, Sophia Thoreau.

The house that David Henry Thoreau was born in is still standing on Virginia Road in Concord, although it stands approximately one hundred yards from its original spot. Preservation efforts have been focused on the house for some time.

David Henry Thoreau often remarked his appearance as homely, with his nose his "most prominent feature". Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote of his appearance: "Thoreau is as ugly as sin, long-nosed, queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and rustic, though courteous manners, corresponding very well with such an exterior. But his ugliness is of an honest and agreeable fashion, and becomes him much better than beauty." Thoreau went to Harvard University from 1833 to 1837. He lived in the Hollis Hall and took

courses in rhetoric, philosophy, science, classics and mathematics. School Legend says that Thoreau refused to pay the five dollar payment for a diploma. The master's degree he had refused to purchase had no academic worth. Henry stated that "Let every sheep keep its own skin". Harvard University said on the topic: "Graduates who proved their physical worth by being alive three years after graduating, and their saving, earning, or inheriting quality or condition by having Five Dollars to give the college."

After Graduating in 1837, Thoreau returned to Concord, Massachusetts. There he joined the Concord Academy. After some time there, he refused to administer corporal punishment, and was dismissed from the school.

Henry David and John Jr. then opened a Grammar School in 1838 in Concord. The School was closed after John Jr. became ill with tetanus in 1842, from cutting himself while shaving. He died soon after in Henry's arms. This may explain why he kept a chin beard for much of his life. He may just have thought that it was very attractive to girls. (A friend of his stated this later in Thoreau's life.)

As well as starting a school in Concord, He med Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ralph ended up becoming a second father to Henry, and would advise him from a paternal perspective. Through Ralph, Henry was able to enter a circle of local writers. This circle included Ellery Channing, Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel's son.

Ralph Waldo Emerson often urged Henry to send poems and essays to the quarterly periodical,

The Dial. Emerson would persuade the editor, Margaret Fuller to add the writings to the magazine.

Henry was a philosopher of "nature and its relation to the human condition". He followed Transcendentalism for most of his early years. Transcendentalism is the belief that nature is the sign of inward spirit, and that personal intuition is the way to receive insight, not religious doctrine.

Thoreau moved into the Emerson house of April 18, 1841. He would serve as the Emerson children's tutor until 1844. He also was the editorial assistant and repair man, as well as the gardener. During this time he wrote for a few New York magazines, aided by Horace Greeley, who would become his literary representative in the future.

After leaving his tutoring in 1844 he returned to Concord and worked in his families pencil factory. He would continue this job for much of his adult life. Henry benefited the factory a few times. The first he rediscovered how to make bad graphite good again, allowing his father to use the graphite found in New Hampshire. This process was originally used and patented by NicolasJacques Conte in 1795. The process involves mixing the graphite in clay to make the bad graphite bond like good graphite.

Later, Henry would convert the factory to make plumbago, the graphite variety that is used to ink typesetting machines. As well as working at the pencil factory, he and his friend, Edward Hoar set fire to 300 acres of

Walden Woods (of course, accidentally). He would often speak of finding a farm to settle into to write his first book.

Thoreau started a two-year experiment on civil living on July 4, 1845 by moving into a small house that he built. The house was on the shores of Walden Pond, surrounded by a secondgrowth forest on land owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson, about 1.5 miles from the house he was born in.

About twenty days later he ran into a local tax collector, who asked him to "pay six years of delinquent poll taxes". Henry David refused to pay, mainly because he opposed slavery and the Mexican-American War. He spent the night in the local Jail because of his refusal. He was let go the next day after his aunt paid the taxes.

Two years later he began to deliver lectures of "The Rights and Duties of the Individual in relation to Government." The lectures explained his tax resistance at the Concord Lyceum. One of the attendees was Bronson Alcott, one of the people in the writing circle Henry had been in. Bronson wrote of the lecture in his Journal: "Heard Thoreaus lecture before the Lyceum on the relation of the individual to the State an admirable statement of the rights of the individual to self-government, and an attentive audience. His allusions to the Mexican War, to Mr. Hoars expulsion from Carolina, his own imprisonment in Concord Jail for refusal to pay his tax, Mr. Hoars payment of mine when taken to prison for a similar refusal, were all pertinent, well considered, and reasoned. I took great pleasure in this deed of Thoreaus" A revised version of the lecture was published in the May 1849 issue of Aesthetic Papers by

Elizabeth Peabody. The essay was entitled Resistance to Civil Government. In the essay he stated that "Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison."

At Walden Pond Henry completed the first draft of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, which told of his and John's journey to the White Mountains in 1839. He was not able to find a publisher for the book and self printed one-thousand copies at his own expense. Only three hundred sold, and he fell into a debt that took years to pay off. He had printed at the advice of Ralph Emerson, and this caused a break of their friendship that never healed.

After leaving Walden Pond in 1847 he began revising the book of his time there. In 1854 he finally had paid off his debts, and published the book Walden, or Life in the Woods, which recounted the two years, two months and two days he had spent at Walden Pond. He represented human development by compressing the book into four seasons (one year) of time. The book is now considered to be a classic American book that shows simplicity in life.

During the 1850's Henry had become fascinated with natural history and expedition stories. He became an avid botany reader, and admired William Bartram and Charles Darwin for their Voyage of the Beagle. He kept increasingly detailed notes of anything in the 26 square miles of the Concord township that ever happened in nature. He recorded things from the water depth of Walden Pond to the days that the birds migrated. The notes compromised of over two million words, which he kept for 24 years. He Published his notes in Autumnal Tints, The Succession of Trees, and Wild Apples. The last

was a essay screaming for attention about the pending destruction of Wild and indigenous apples.

In his later years Henry traveled to Quebec, Cape Cod, and Maine. Each inspired him to write books. They were titled A Yankee in Canada, Cape Cod, and The Maine Woods, his excursion books.

After John Brown raided Harpers Ferry at the beginning of the Civil War, many distanced themselved from Brown. Through a few essays, Henry was able to bring abolitionists back to John Brown. The movement moved back to John at just the right time, and the Union soldiers were "singing" his words. A Biographer of John Brown put it this way: If, as Alfred Kazin suggests, without John Brown there would have been no Civil War, we would add that without the Concord Transcendentalists, John Brown would have had little cultural impact.

In 1835 Henry first contracted Tuberculosis, and would sporadically suffer from it for life. During a trip to a tree stump to count its rings in 1859 he became sick with bronchitis. Over three years his health would decline until he became bedridden. He then realized that this was it, and began to edit his unpublished books. He petitioned publishers to reprint a revised version of A Week and Walden. His letters and journal entries would consume the last writings of his life. His last words were "Now comes good sailing", which was followed by two words, "moose" and "Indian". He died of May 6, 1862 at the age of 44. At his funeral service Bronson Alcott prepared pieces of his works and read them. He was originally buried with the Dunbar Family, but would later be moved to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts.