He was attentive to what was going on in the community. “He was active in circulating petitions for neighbors in need. “One misperception that has persisted is that he was a hermit who cared little for others,” says Witherell.

But the full story of Thoreau’s life involves subtleties and contradictions that call his popular image into question. As the capsule summary goes, Thoreau was an oddball loner who lived by a lake, writing in praise of nature and against modern progress. Many readers, faced with Thoreau’s enigmatic Yankee persona, have resorted to a kind of pop-culture shorthand for describing his life. Its magic density yields dozens of different readings-psychological, spiritual, literary, political, cultural.” “Its writing resembles nothing so much as Scripture ideas are condensed to epigrams, four or five to a paragraph. “Understanding the whole of this book is a hopeless task,” McKibben said. This man told us more of himself than perhaps any other American writer, and still he remains beyond fathoming.”įor nature author Bill McKibben, the question of Thoreau’s true self is obscured not only by the breadth of his writings, but their depth. The scale of Thoreau’s oeuvre, not easily digested in its entirety, invites selective quotation, tempting readers to pick and choose passages that support their pet theories about him.ĭavid Quammen, a science and nature writer who’s looked to Thoreau for inspiration, put it this way: “In fact, the case of Henry Thoreau stands as proof for the whole notion of human inscrutability. But the sheer volume of Thoreau’s prose has, paradoxically, complicated the work of gaining a complete understanding of his personality. In addition to Walden and a few celebrated travelogs, such as Cape Cod and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Thoreau (1817–1862) kept a copious journal that, in a previously published edition, stretched to fourteen volumes and some two million words. Not that Thoreau’s life lacked documentation. “Thoreau was not a person who revealed himself easily,” says Witherell, offering a view shared by scholars and general readers for generations. The letters offer a personal and intimate side of the man most famous as the author of Walden, an account of two years spent in a tiny cabin he built on Walden Pond outside Concord, Massachusetts.

Henry david thoreau