| Name: |
Henry David Thoreau |
| Birth Date: |
|
| Death Date: |
|
| Place of Birth: |
|
| Place of Death: |
|
| Nationality: |
|
| Gender: |
|
| Occupations: |
|
Generally unrecognized in his own day or, worse, dismissed as a second-rate imitator of his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, in the twentieth century, has emerged as one of America's greatest literary figures. Walden; Or, Life in the Woods (1854), his account of two years spent living in a cabin on the shore of a pond in his native Concord, is universally recognized as the preeminent piece of American nature writing, though it is far more than simply a nature book. "Civil Disobedience," the account of and justification for his night spent in jail in Concord in protest against slavery, particularly through its influence on such activists as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, has had wider political impact around the world than any other American literary document. As a prose stylist, Thoreau has been acknowledged by writers as disparate as Robert Louis Stevenson, Marcel Proust, Sinclair Lewis, and Henry Miller to be their master.
This is a free page. This page contains 151 words. This
biography contains 7,480 words (approx. 25 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Henry David Thoreau Access Pass.
