New Thoreau Bust

 

 

This Thoreau bust was created in 2005 by Daniel Altshuler from the 1856 Maxham daguerreotype and was generously donated by the artist to the Walden Woods Project.

 

Daniel Altshuler was raised in Concord, Massachusetts. His mother, Suzanne H. Altshuler, was a portrait artist, as well as an illustrator of Concord houses and landscapes. Her enthusiasm for Thoreau permeated his childhood and she suggested that Daniel make busts of Thoreau, Emerson and Louisa May Alcott. Altshuler attended art school at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, while working as a sculptural assistant to Walker Hancock (1901-1997) for 13 years in the classical style. Altshuler's statuary are found in public and private locations in different parts of the US as well as some Western and Eastern countries. As the only sculptor/medalist representative in the US on the (CCAC) Citizens Coinage Advisory Committee, Altshuler is one on a committee of eight that was appointed by the Secretary of the Treasury, John Snow, to review and recommend all US coin design, congressional medals and bullion. Presently he resides in Gloucester, Massachusetts, developing statuary for private and public locations. For more information about the sculptor, log on to his website.

 

 

Walter Harding Diaries
Added to the Thoreau Society’s

Walter Harding Collection

 

 

In July, the Thoreau Institute was visited by Marjorie Harding, widow of Walter Harding, and their son Alan, in order to present to Thoreau Society President Bob Hudspeth several diaries of Walter Harding. Several of these volumes, dating from the 1940s, show the development of the preeminent Thoreau scholar and biographer’s thinking about Thoreau, his plans for writing about Thoreau, as well as the beginnings of the Thoreau Society. Below is a sample from 1 May 1944, written during World War II:

 

                I am probably better known for my Thoreau research than for anything else. With the exception of Raymond Adams and possibly Henry Seidel Canby, probably I do know more about Thoreau than anyone else alive today. I have made him my chief object of study since 1939. I have read nearly every book and magazine article available on him. I have delved into manuscripts and old newspaper files and lyceum records in the great libraries of the East Coast. I have talked with or corresponded with all the major students of Thoreau in the country and a large part of the specialists on the other Transcendentalists. I have built up one of the largest collections of Thoreauviana (only Dr. Adams’ collection is larger, so far as I know) . . .  .

                It is little wonder then that some of my friends ask why and how I find such concentrated study worthwhile . . . .

                While the collection is slowly bearing fruit, my studies are not as yet. As I said yesterday, I have not yet written anything of great significance on Thoreau. I am growing into the spirit of Thoreau but have not yet progressed far enough to produce anything of importance. My dozen or so articles on him have been mere recitals of facts. There has been little or no interpretation in terms of life today. That is yet to come. People keep asking me if I am going to write a biography of Thoreau – and I answer that I don’t know. The success of Canby’s book has removed the need of a factual account of Thoreau’s life for a few years at least – although as I have said time and time before, Canby treats the ruggedness of Thoreau with kid gloves and goes completely overboard on his Freudian theories. Odell Shepard has told me that he for a great many years has been at work on a new life of Thoreau and his approach I think is the best yet. He is studying the development of a philosophy of life in Thoreau’s mind as it matured. It will be a biography of Thoreau’s mind rather than of his body.  .  . Yet that is almost precisely what I would be most interested in doing – so there is little point in my starting until I see what Shepard produces.

                What would be the value of such a study? I suspect it would be this. It seems to me that Thoreau’s critical approach to life is nearly ideal. To him nothing was sacred in itself. He judged everything by its own inherent value, not by the value it has acquired historically. Thus many false precepts he was able to discard. Many facts he was able to interpret in a new and more valid light. He was of course not always right. . . . Rather the significant contribution of Thoreau is what might be termed his “mind-set.” We need to produce more citizens who will question things as he did. If we study his pattern, we may learn the secret of producing such men. If we succeed, we will have taken one of the greatest strides toward producing that ideal democracy about which so much is said and so little done these days. For it is only through an enlightened, questioning citizenry that we may achieve such a utopia. Therein lies the value of Thoreau.

 

 

 

 

 

Some Recent Additions to the Collections:

 

Daniel, John Rogue River Journal: A Winter Alone (Washington, D.C.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005)

Gerard, John The Herbal, or, General History of Plants ( New York: Dover, 1975: Reprint of the 1633 edition printed by A. Islip, J. Norton, and R. Whitakers, London, under title: The Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes)

Megan, Marshall The Peabody Sisters: Three American Women who Ignited American Romanticism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005)

McKibben, Bill  Wandering Home: A Long Walk across America’s Most Hopeful Landscape (New York: Crown Journeys, 2005)

Mitchell, John Hanson Looking for Mr. Gilbert: The Reconstructed Life of an African American (Washington, D.C.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005)

Phelps, Lincoln, Mrs. Familiar Lectures on Botany (New York: Huntington & Savage, 1846)

Reynolds, David S. John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights (New York: Knopf, 2005)

 

For more information about these and other titles,
go to Thoreau Institute Library Catalog

 

 

Upcoming event:

 

The Walden Woods Project

in conjunction with the

2005 Concord Festival of Authors

presents

 

Philip Cafaro, author of Thoreau’s Living Ethics

October 27, 2005, 7:00pm – 9:00pm