Henry David Thoreau

Biography

American essayist, philosopher and leading transcendentalist, born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1817 and a Harvard graduate of 1837. Between 1845 and 1847 he lived alone in a cabin he built on the shore of Walden Pond, the experience behind Walden (1854). His essay Civil Disobedience appeared in 1849; he spent a night in jail for refusing to pay a poll tax supporting the Mexican-American War. He wrote continuously in his journal on nature and politics, much of it published after his death, and since the twentieth century has been recognised as an American writer of world influence.