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Henry David Thoreau

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Born: July 11 1817

Died: 0505 05 18621862

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Henry David Thoreau was an American author, naturalist, transcendentalist, tax resister, development critic, philosopher, and abolitionist who is best known for Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay, Civil Disobedience, an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state.

Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry total over 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions were his writings on natural history and philosophy, where he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern day environmentalism.

In 1817, Henry David Thoreau was born in Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard University in 1837, taught briefly, then turned to writing and lecturing. Becoming a Transcendentalist and good friend of Emerson, Thoreau lived the life of simplicity he advocated in his writings. His two-year experience in a hut in Walden, on land owned by Emerson, resulted in the classic, Walden: Life in the Woods . During his sojourn there, Thoreau refused to pay a poll tax in protest of slavery and the Mexican war, for which he was jailed overnight. His activist convictions were expressed in the groundbreaking On the Duty of Civil Disobedience . In a diary he noted his disapproval of attempts to convert the Algonquins "from their own superstitions to new ones." In a journal he noted dryly that it is appropriate for a church to be the ugliest building in a village, "because it is the one in which human nature stoops to the lowest and is the most disgraced." When Parker Pillsbury sought to talk about religion with Thoreau as he was dying from tuberculosis, Thoreau replied: "One world at a time."

Thoreau's philosophy of nonviolent resistance influenced the political thoughts and actions of such later figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. D. 1862.

More: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/tho...

http://thoreau.eserver.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Da...

http://transcendentalism-legacy.tamu....

http://www.biography.com/people/henry...

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Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau

Books from Henry David Thoreau

Walden

Walden & Civil Disobedience

Civil Disobedience and Other Essays

Civil Disobedience

Walden and Other Writings

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers / Walden / The Maine Woods / Cape Cod

Thoughts from Walden Pond

On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

The Maine Woods (Writings of Henry D. Thoreau)

Thoreau at Walden

The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart: A Poetry Anthology

Where I Lived, and What I Lived For

Walking

Walden / Civil Disobedience / And Other Writings

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (Writings of Henry D. Thoreau)

Collected Essays and Poems

Letters to a Spiritual Seeker

The Works of Henry David Thoreau

Faith in a Seed: The Dispersion of Seeds & Other Late Natural History Writings

Wild Fruits: Thoreau's Rediscovered Last Manuscript