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The Thoreau Institute
at Walden Woods Library
About Thoreau's Life and Writings
Texts and Links
including Thoreau's contemporaries, his readings, current
scholarship and
related documents
Henry D. Thoreau
Brief Overviews: Thoreau,
His Writings
—Elizabeth Witherell
During his lifetime, Henry Thoreau wrote and wrote and wrote—essays, books, poems,
translations, letters, Journal entries—and what he wrote has become an important part
of our heritage as Americans. Even though Thoreau was born over 175 years ago, the
questions he raised—about the meaning of nature, about the need for wildness as a
tonic for the spirit, about individual rights and responsibilities—are still central
issues in American life. In his writings, Thoreau also described situations and asked
questions about human values that are universal.
Thoreau never mentions when he knew that he would be a writer, but he probably decided
sometime during college that he wanted writing to be his life's work. Apart from an early
essay about the seasons that may not be authentic, Thoreau's first surviving compositions
are those he wrote for college classes in English that included composition, logic, and
public speaking. Thoreau took these classes at Harvard from a professor of rhetoric and
oratory named Edward Tyrrel Channing. Channing, who taught a number of outstanding
writers, assigned topics for his classes. Some of Channing's topics clearly influenced
Thoreau's later work as a writer: for example, he wrote a class essay about "the
duty, inconvenience and dangers of conformity, in little things and great." (Early
Essays, 105) Seventeen years later, in
Walden,
he wrote: "If a man does
not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let
him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away." (326)
In Thoreau's day, Harvard graduates usually became teachers or ministers —Harvard
was established as a Puritan institution, and was a Unitarian school when Thoreau attended
in the 1830s—instead of doctors and lawyers. After he graduated in August 1837,
Thoreau taught for a time: his first job was a well paying one as a teacher at the district
school in Concord. He kept that job only two weeks, though. When a member of the school
board visited Thoreau's classroom and found it too noisy, he told Thoreau to maintain
stricter discipline. Irritated at this interference, Thoreau selected several students at
random, whipped them, and resigned (he was making a point, but understandably some of the
students he treated so unfairly never forgave him).
He looked for another teaching job unsuccessfully, and in 1838 started his own school
in Concord; in 1839 his older brother John joined him and they operated the Concord
Academy together until April 1841, when John became ill with tuberculosis and the school
had to close. After that, Thoreau relied on his practical talent to support himself. He
did some painting, gardening, and hauling jobs, and he worked in the family pencil-making
business, and as a surveyor for local landowners.
At about the same time as he began teaching, Thoreau began to keep a journal in which
he collected his thoughts, and he changed the order of his names, from D. Henry to Henry
D. He was declaring himself to be a new man—a writer. This was the most important
part of his identity, and he supported himself at the various other jobs he held in order
to keep writing. In November 1837 he saw his work in print for the first time—the
Concord paper published an
obituary that he had written.
After the Concord Academy closed in 1841, Thoreau accepted an offer from
Ralph Waldo Emerson, another famous Concord writer, who lived across town from his family's home, to
stay with Emerson's family and earn his keep as a handyman and gardener while he
concentrated on his writing. The two and a half years that he spent in the Emerson
household gave him freedom to read and think and write when he most needed it. While he
was there, he reorganized and recopied what he had written up to then in his Journal, and
he decided on the structure and began to gather materials for his first book,
A Week
on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. He wrote several essays and a number of poems,
and published some of these in a magazine called
The Dial
that he helped Emerson to
edit.
In 1847, when Thoreau described his life for the members of his Harvard class, he
listed "writer" as only one occupation among many: "I am a
Schoolmaster—a Private Tutor, a Surveyor—a Gardener, a Farmer—a Painter, I
mean a House Painter, a Carpenter, a Mason, a Day-Laborer, a Pencil-Maker, a Glass-paper
Maker, a Writer, and sometimes a Poetaster." (Correspondence, 196) He was
on the verge of realizing his dream of publishing a book, though: in 1849, A Week
appeared, and even though it didn't sell well, Thoreau's sense of himself as a real
writer was confirmed.
Thoreau continued to write, about trips he took—to
Cape Cod and to the
Maine
Woods—and about his walks around Concord, during which he carefully observed the
changing colors of the leaves in the fall and the life history of the wild apple tree. He
wrote about current events, too—the injustice of the Fugitive Slave Law and of the
death sentence the abolitionist John Brown received for leading the raid on Harper's
Ferry. And he wrote about a philosophical question—the problem of how to live our
lives when the goal of being true to ourselves seems to be in conflict with the duty to be
responsible members of society.
Thoreau wrote his most influential book,
Walden,
about the cycle of his life at
Walden Pond, a lake about two miles from the center of Concord where he lived from 1845
until 1847. But his largest, most impressive work is the
journal he kept—it contains
over two million words. He wrote the first entry in October 1837 and the last one in
November 1861: altogether he filled almost fifty notebooks with observations about what
he'd seen on his walks, comments on the books he was reading, accounts of conversations
with his neighbors, and drafts of parts of the lectures and essays and books he was
writing. After 1850, he wrote regularly in his journal. Instead of writing every day,
though, he seems to have kept notes for several days and then written up the entries a few
days at a time.
Journal-keeping in the mid-nineteenth century was a more public form of writing than it
is usually considered today. Many of Thoreau's literary neighbors in Concord also kept
journals—Emerson,
Nathaniel
Hawthorne,
Bronson Alcott and his daughter
Louisa
May—and they sometimes exchanged notebooks and read each others' observations and
reflections. Letter-writing was another form of communication much more popular then than
now—and necessary, as well, with no telephones and limited means of travel. In his
letters, Thoreau reveals aspects of his personality more directly than in his published
writings or even in his journal. In July 1849, he wrote to Emerson's ten-year-old
daughter, Ellen, who was visiting her cousins on Staten Island:
I can guess pretty well what interests you, and what you think about. Indeed I am
interested in pretty much the same things myself. I suppose you think that persons who are
as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know
that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we
go more gravely about it. (Correspondence, 245)
Thoreau's books and essays and poems and letters and his Journal are all that really
survive of him—the details of his life and personality are interesting and useful to
know about, but you can have your own direct relationship only with the words that he
wrote. Thousands of people all over the world have done so, and Thoreau has inspired
readers like U.S. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963), Indian leader Mahatma
Gandhi (1869-1948), and civil-rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968) to
great ideas and noble deeds. Read Thoreau and prepare to let your life be changed!
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