Henry David Thoreau influenced countless people around the world with his observations on the natural world and human existence, but never more strongly than with his most deeply autobiographical work Walden. This literary masterpiece relates Thoreau’s account of his “experiment in living,” the twenty-six months he resided in a small cabin built with his own hands on Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts (Parini, 1999).
Walden, however, is more than an autobiographical work. As The American Tradition in Literature (1989) relates, it is “...a complex organization of themes related to the central concept of individualism," including "the economy of individualism; the spiritual and temporal values of individualism in society or in solitude; the survival of self-reliance amid depersonalizing social organizations; the related observations of animal and plant life; and the transcendental concept of the accomplished human personality, simultaneously aware of relations both with Time and the Timeless" (p. 479).
A Short Biography of Henry David Thoreau
Of Scottish and Huguenot ancestry, Thoreau was born July 12, 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts. The son of a pencil maker, he attended school at the Concord Academy in preparation for entry into Harvard University, from which he graduated in 1837. Following graduation, Thoreau partnered with his brother John to establish a private school, but although successful, the venture ended in 1841 with John’s death from lockjaw at age twenty-seven. (Columbia, 1998)
Following the loss of his brother, a grief-stricken Thoreau wrote a book based upon a journey undertaken with his brother in 1939. The book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), was generally neglected by the reading public, though, because while some readers found it “occasionally charming,” the majority found the narrative obscured by discursive, essay-like observations (Columbia, 1998).
A member of the informal Transcendental Club, also known as the Concord Transcendental Group, Thoreau benefited from the companionship and intellectual stimulation of fellow members such as Walt Whitman, Bronson Alcott, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. He also contributed essays, translations, and several poems to the Club-sponsored publication The Dial. Interestingly, although he was best known for his prose, Thoreau’s poetry is considered “genuinely inspired and independent,” reflecting the same lyrical response to the world that pervades his prose. (Perkins, 1989)
Henry David Thoreau’s Most Significant Work: Walden
On July 4, 1845, Thoreau began an adventure that would have a profound impact upon his life and subsequently upon countless other lives: his residence at Walden Pond. His goal in living there and earning his living by the labor of his hands was to conduct what he called “an experiment in living.” He constructed his “tight shingled and plastered house” himself. It was ten feet wide, fifteen feet long, contained “a garret and a closet,” and had “two trap doors, one door at the end, and a brick fireplace opposite.” Moreover, as Thoreau relates, he spent a total of 28 dollars, twelve-and-a-half cents on materials, “excepting the timber, stones, and sand, which I claimed by squatter’s rights.” (Perkins, 1989, p. 486)
The Lessons Taught In Walden
Thoreau relates his reason for going to live on a quite pond in Concord, Massachusetts:
- I went to the woods to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine measure of it, and publish its meanness to the world, or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. (Walden, 1854)
Thoreau also maintained that a man was wealthy in direct proportion to the number of things he could afford to leave alone. As he says:
- Our lives are frittered away by detail. An honest man hardly needs to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumbnail. (Walden 1854)
In summary, Henry David Thoreau went to the woods to live deliberately, and he left twenty-six months later, as he said, “...for as good a reason as I went there.” However, during his time in this bucolic setting, Thoreau learned an important lesson: “If one advances confidently in the direction or his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours.” (Walden, 1854)
Sources:
Concise Columbia Encyclopedia (1998) Henry David Thoreau; New York: Avon Books
Thoreau, H. D. (1854). Cramer, J. S., ed. (2004) Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition. New Haven, CONN: Yale University Press
Parini, J. ((1999) The Norton Book of American Autobiography; W.W. Norton & Company: New York
Perkins, G., ed. (1989) The American Tradition in Literature; New York: Random House
Carol Rzadkiewicz - Carol Rzadkiewicz has taught college English for over 14 years and is the author of three published novels and numerous short stories.
