Thoreau Grave
42.464714°N 71.342422°W

6/24/2012 3:53:50 PM

Thoreau Grave
42.464714°N 71.342422°W

6/24/2012 3:53:38 PM

Sleepy Hollow Cemetery

Henry David Thoreau was fundamentally a naturalist and endeavored to take himself back to nature on the land that Ralph Waldo Emerson owned on Walden Pond. He wrote the first draft of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers while living on Walden Pond about his brother’s trip to the White Mountains. On September 6th, 1847, he left his cabin and went to live in Emerson’s home which was only 1.5 miles away. In 1854, he published Walden about his life in the cabin and on the lake. The book was condensed into 1 year even though Walden lived in the cabin for more than two years.

Thoreau worked in his family’s pencil factory for most of his life and later became involved in the abolitionist movement. He wrote his essay entitled Civil Disobedience in May, 1849 partly in response to running in to the tax collector in 1846 while he was living on Walden Pond. He was asked to pay six years of delinquent poll tax but refused based primarily on his objection to the Mexican-American War. His refusal cost him a night in jail until his aunt paid the taxes much to his chagrin.

Thoreau contracted tuberculosis and eventually bronchitis and died at the young age of 44.
<

Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist. He is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay Civil Disobedience, an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state.

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry David Thoreau