Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1817. He
graduated from Harvard in 1837, the same year he began his lifelong
Journal. Inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau became a key
member of the Transcendentalist movement that included Margaret
Fuller and Bronson Alcott. The Transcendentalists' faith in nature
was tested by Thoreau between 1845 and 1847 when he lived for
twenty-six months in a homemade hut at Walden Pond. While living at
Walden, Thoreau worked on the two books published during his
lifetime: Walden (1854) and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack
Rivers (1849). Several of his other works, including The Maine
Woods, Cape Cod, and Excursions, were published posthumously.
Thoreau died in Concord, at the age of forty-four, in 1862.
Carl Bode, professor emeritus of English/American Studies at the
University of Maryland, is a freelance writer. Founder and first
president of the American Studies Assocation, he is also past
president of he Popular Culture Association and the Mencken
Society. His books include The American Lyceum, Antebellum Culture,
and Mencken. He has edited Collected Poems of Henry Thoreau and The
Best of Thoreau's Journals; and has co-edited The Correspondence of
Henry David Thoreau and, in collaboration with Malcolm Cowley, The
Portable Emerson.
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