Thoreau, Henry David

Abstract David Henry Thoreau (1817–62) was born in Concord, Massachusetts. His family moved a number of times but returned to Concord in 1823, where his father was a shopkeeper and later had a pencil business. The rest of his life except for his college years and some periods of travel was spent in Concord, to which he had a complicated and sometimes confrontational relationship. He went to Harvard College from which he graduated in 1837, after which he returned to Concord, where he was for a brief time a schoolteacher. He began the most important friendship of his life with Ralph Waldo Emerson ( see Emerson, Ralph Waldo) in Concord after his graduation from college. In this period when Thoreau was trying to find a course of life for himself, Emerson encouraged him to keep a journal. He did so for the rest of his life, and almost all of his published writing began in this journal. Like Emerson he reshaped that raw material of his journal into lectures, essays, and the books he published in his lifetime. (Thoreau also changed the order of his given names to Henry David.) He worked in the family pencil business, lived and worked in the Emerson household as a general factotum for a time, and worked as a land surveyor off and on for the rest of his life. Thoreau was a writer, a poet, a student of philosophy, and an avid reader of the wisdom literature of other, especially Asian, traditions. He was also the greatest of American “nature writers.” He died in Concord in 1862.