Henry David Thoreau, Henry David Thoreau

Walden and on the Duty of Civil Disobedience (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Essayist, poet, and naturalist, was born at Concord, Massachusetts. His father, of French extraction, from Jersey, was a manufacturer of lead-pencils. He was educated at Harvard, where he became a good classical scholar. Subsequently he was a competent Orientalist, and was deeply versed in the history and manners of the Red Indians. No form of regular remunerative employment commending itself to him, he spent the 10 years after leaving college in the study of books and nature, for the latter of which he had exceptional qualifications in the acuteness of his senses and his powers of observation. Though not a misanthropist, he appears in general to have preferred solitary communion with nature to human society. “The man I meet,” he said, “is seldom so instructive as the silence which he breaks;” and he described himself as “a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a natural philosopher.” He made such money as his extremely simple mode of life called for, by building boats or fences, agricultural or garden work, and surveying, anything almost of an outdoor character which did not involve lengthened engagement.In 1837 he began his diaries, records of observation with which in ten years he filled 30 vols. In 1839 he made the excursion the record of which he in 1845 published as A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers. Two years later, in 1841, he began a residence in the household of Emerson, which lasted for two years, when he assisted in conducting the Dial, and in 1845, after some teaching in New York, he retired to a hut near the solitary Walden Pond to write his Week on the Concord, etc. Later works were Walden [1854], and The Maine Woods [1864], and Cape Cod [1865], accounts of excursions and observations, both published after his death. Thoreau was an enthusiast in the anti-slavery cause, the triumph of which, however, he did not live to see, as he died on May 6, 1862, when the war was still in its earlier stages.The deliberate aim of Thoreau was to live a life as nearly approaching naturalness as possible; and to this end he passed his time largely in solitude and in the open air. As he says, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach.” To his great powers of observation he added great powers of reflection, and two of the most characteristic features of his writings are immediateness and individuality in his descriptions of nature, and a remarkable power of giving permanent and clear form to the most subtle and evanescent mental impressions.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Henry David Thoreau
• Erscheinungstermin: 6. Oktober 2015
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9788893159852
• Artikelnr.: 43899918

Autorenporträt

Naturalist, writer, poet, and philosopher Henry David Thoreau was an American who lived from July 12, 1817, to May 6, 1862. His most well-known work, Walden, is a meditation on simple life in the natural world. He was a forerunner of ecological theory and environmental history, two major influences on contemporary environmentalism. In Concord, Massachusetts, Henry David Thoreau was born into a humble family. Between 1833 and 1837, he attended Harvard College for his studies. He worked as a land surveyor and continued to keep a two million-word notebook for 24 years, recording ever-more-detailed observations on the natural history of the town, which covered an area of 26 square miles (67 square kilometers). Thoreau never got married and never had kids. He proposed to Ellen Sewall, then 18 years old, when he was 23 years old, but she declined on the advice of her father. On May 6, 1862, Henry David Thoreau passed away. He was 44. After contracting TB in 1835, he intermittently experienced its effects. His final words, spoken while he was still conscious, were "Now comes good sailing," followed by the words "moose" and "Indian." In Concord, Massachusetts' Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, he was laid to rest.