Henry David Thoreau

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 writings Walden, his account of a two year period in which he lived in relative solitude in Walden Pond in Massachusetts, and Civil Disobedience, which depicts his refusal to pay a tax that would support the Mexican-American War and his resulting arrest.

Thoreau is sometimes thought of as a sort of 1800s hippie, but in fact Thoreau was completely serious about carrying on the family business, which was the manufacturing of pencils. 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.