Difference between revisions of "Henry David Thoreau"
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Revision as of 15:28, March 27, 2008
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was an American writer and philosopher, and along with Ralph Waldo Emerson, a major figure in the Transcendentalist movement. He is perhaps best known for his book Walden (1854), an account of a two year period during which he lived in relative solitude near the shores of Walden Pond in Massachusetts, and Civil Disobedience (1849), an essay which depicts his arrest for refusing to pay his poll tax in 1845 that would support the Mexican-American War and slavery. In A Plea for John Brown (1859) he defended the Harper's Ferry Raid.
His work Civil Disobedience would served as inspiration for Gandhi, Tolstoy and modern civil rights leaders as using non-violent means of protest to further a cause.[1]
Thoreau is sometimes mistakenly thought of as a sort of hermit or vagabond, but in fact he was completely serious about carrying on the family business, a pencil factory. He made significant improvements in their manufacture, and engineered a machine for grinding "plumbago" (graphite) finer, to produce a higher-quality "lead." Thoreau pencils were regarded as being among the best manufactured in the U. S.[2]
When asked, on his deathbed, whether he had made his peace with God, Thoreau responded, "I did not know we had ever quarreled."