Authors
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
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The Princeton Edition of Thoreau’s work (1971– ) is standard. Of the volumes published so far, Walden (1971), edited by J. Lyndon Shanley, must be supplemented by Shanley’s The Making of “Walden” (1957, 1966) and Jeffrey S. Cramer’s Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition (2004). The Princeton Edition includes the journals (1981–), previously available in an imperfectly transcribed edition (1906, 1962), as well as the Correspondence. For now, Thoreau’s letters are mostly available in Carl Bode and Walter Harding’s Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau (1958), supplemented by Kenneth W. Cameron’s Companion to Thoreau’s Correspondence (1964). The Library of America has made available Collected Essays and Poems (2001), edited by Elizabeth Hall Witherell. Raymond R. Borst compiled The Thoreau Log: A Documentary Life of Henry David Thoreau, 1817–1862 (1992); see also Richard Schneider’s Henry David Thoreau: A Documentary Volume (2004). The most reliable narrative biography is still Walter Harding’s The Days of Henry Thoreau: A Biography (1965); for an excellent intellectual biography, see Robert D. Richardson’s Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (1986). Walter Harding’s Thoreau Handbook (1959) was revised by Harding and Michael Meyer (1980). Essential is Robert Sattelmeyer’s Thoreau’s Reading: A Study in Intellectual History with Bibliographical Catalogue (1988). Gary Scharnhorst compiled Henry David Thoreau: An Annotated Bibliography of Comment and Criticism before 1900 (1992); Raymond R. Borst prepared Henry David Thoreau: A Descriptive Bibliography (1982) and edited Henry David Thoreau: A Reference Guide, 1835–1899 (1987). Thoreau’s reputation is surveyed in Wendell Glick’s The Recognition of Henry David Thoreau (1969), Michael Meyer’s Several More Lives to Live: Thoreau’s Political Reputation in America (1977), Joel Myerson’s Emerson and Thoreau: The Contemporary Reviews (1992), and Gary Scharnhorst’s Henry David Thoreau: A Case Study in Canonization (1993). Good collections of critical essays include Myerson’s Critical Essays on Henry David Thoreau (1988), Robert F. Sayre’s New Essays on Walden (1992), Myerson’s The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau (1995), and William E. Cain’s A Historical Guide to Henry David Thoreau (2000). Three critical books related by their interest in compositional process and literary professionalism are Stephen Adams and Donald Ross Jr.’s Revising Mythologies: The Composition of Thoreau’s Major Works (1988), Steven Fink’s Prophet in the Marketplace: Thoreau’s Development as a Professional Writer (1992), and Robert Milder’s Reimagining Thoreau (1995). Lawrence Buell’s The Environmental Imagination (1995), which has a major section on Thoreau, is a classic in a new field of study. Recent critical work includes Alan D. Hodder’s Thoreau’s Ecstatic Witness (2001), Joel Porte’s Consciousness and Culture: Emerson and Thoreau Reviewed (2004), and David M. Robinson’s Natural Life: Thoreau’s Worldly Transcendentalism (2004).
Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, and spent most of his life in and around that town. Thoreau was an outspoken abolitionist, and during his lifetime his most widely read works were such antislavery tracts as Slavery in Massachusetts and A Plea for Captain John Brown. Most readers, though, remember Thoreau as a naturalist. His most famous book, Walden (1854), records the two years he spent living in a self-crafted cabin beside Emerson's Walden Pond. The Walden experiment reflected the greater philosophy of Thoreau's life: he believed that people should not be driven by materialistic desires but should live according to their needs, simplifying their life-styles rather than earning money to support lavish and ostentatious show. Thoreau worked from time to time in his father's pencil factory, but the dust from the graphite aggravated Thoreau's tuberculosis, and he died a few years after taking over the family business. After his death, passages about nature were culled from his journal writings and printed in magazines; the journals were published as a whole in 1906. To this day, Thoreau remains among the most important and challenging of American nature writers, philosophers, and social critics.
Questions for Discussion and Writing
Walden (1854) is widely regarded (and taught) as a sacrosanct text, an eloquent, detailed, passionate refusal of materialism and of emerging American middle-class values and a celebration of a rigorously simple life in harmony with the natural world. While such readings are persuasive, they can miss the playfulness and changefulness in the book and the evolving consciousness that it chronicles. Thoreau is a dynamic personality, not a curmudgeon, and Walden is in part the story of a mind in motion.
1. Review the long paragraph starting at the bottom of NAAL 1.1939 ("However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names"). Then turn to NAAL 1.1769 and review the two paragraphs beginning "I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle . . ." What relationship do you observe between these paragraphs? How would you compare their tone and central themes?
2. In those opening paragraphs, Thoreau refers to the New Testament as "an old book." How would you describe his rhetorical strategy here? What kind of audience was he writing to and for? What might the response be, and how might that response work to Thoreau's advantage? Can you find other moments in the opening chapters of Walden where he uses a similar technique?
3. Throughout Walden, some of Thoreau's famous wisecracks are about new technologies and communication systems--newspapers, telegraphs, railroads. In what spirit should we take these comments? Do you find any grain of truth or usefulness in them, in the midst of the Information Age?
4. Thoreau built his cabin on woods owned by Emerson; he used manufactured tools, milled boards, and printed books; he was only about a mile from the center of Concord and came in frequently, not only to visit and talk with his gifted neighbors but to dine with them and enjoy some of the pleasures of town life. And eventually, as he tells us, he left his cabin and moved back to Concord. Do these facts compromise Walden? Why or why not?
