Of the many esteemed authors who made their home at Concord, he was the only town native. Emerson took a strong paternal, and sometimes patronizing liking to Thoreau, and delighted advising the young man and introducing him into his social circle, which consisted of some of the most important American writers and thinkers of the period including Ellery Channing, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, and Nathaniel Hawthorne and his son Julian (at that time only a boy). Upon graduation, he returned home, where he became a companion of Ralph Waldo Emerson. In fact, the Masters' degree he declined to purchase had no academic merit: Harvard College offered it to graduates 'who proved their physical worth by being alive three years after graduating, and their saving, earning, or inheriting quality or condition by having Five Dollars to give the college.' (Thoreau's Diploma) His comment was Let every sheep keep its own skin. Legends state that Thoreau refused to pay a five-dollar fee for a Harvard diploma. Today, an equivalent degree would be in comparative literature. Thoreau studied at Harvard between 18, majoring in English. But his ugliness is of an honest and agreeable fashion, and becomes him much better than beauty.' Of his face, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote: ' is as ugly as sin, long-nosed, queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and rustic, though courteous manners, corresponding very well with such an exterior. A Concord variant is THUR-eau, like the English word 'thorough.' In appearance he was homely, with a nose that he called 'my most prominent feature'. He had two older siblings, Helen and John Jr, and a younger sister Sophia.īronson Alcott notes in his Journal that Thoreau pronounced his family name THOR-eau, stress on the first syllable, not the last, a common error today. He didn't change his name to 'Henry David' until he had graduated from Harvard, although he never petitioned the government to do so officially. He was named after a recently deceased paternal Uncle, David Thoreau. Among his lasting contributions were his writings on natural history and philosophy, where he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern day environmentalism.ĭavid Henry Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, to John and Cynthia Thoreau. He was a lifelong abolitionist, delivering lectures that attacked the Fugitive Slave Law while praising the writings of Wendell Phillips and defending the abolitionist John Brown.

Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817- born David Henry Thoreau) was an American author, naturalist, transcendentalist, pacifist, tax resister and philosopher who is famous for Civil Disobedience, on resistance to civil government and among 22 other books that Thoreau published.

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