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Welcome to a personal collection of links to one of the world's greatest philosopher,poet and environmentalist...
The American writer, thinker, and naturalist Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, on 12 July 1817.
In 1838 Henry, with his brother, went on a two week boating trip that Thoreau later memorialized in his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, published in 1849. In 1840 Thoreau published poems and essays in the transcendentalist periodical, The Dial, and from 1841 to 1843 he lived with the famous author and lecturer Ralph Waldo Emerson.During his lifetime, Henry Thoreau wrote and wrote—essays, books, poems, translations, letters, Journal entries—and what he wrote has become an important part of world heritage. 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 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.
