Henry David Thoreau : a life / Laura Dassow Walls.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Walls, Laura Dassow, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Thoreau, Henry David, 1817-1862.

Thoreau, Henry David.

Authors, American--19th century--Biography.

Authors, American.

Naturalists--United States--Biography.

Naturalists.

United States.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

xx, 615 pages, 32 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2017.

Summary:

"Walden. yesterday I cam here to live." That entry from the journal of Henry David Thoreau, and the intellectual journey it began, would by themselves be enough to place Thoreau in the American pantheon. His attempt to "live deliberately" in a small woods at the edge of his hometown of Concord has been a touchstone for individualists and seekers since the publication of Walden in 1854. But there was much more to Thoreau than his brief experiment in living at Walden Pond. A member of the vibrant intellectual circle centered on his neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson, he was also an ardent naturalist, a manual laborer and inventor, a radical political activist, and more. Many books have taken up various aspects of Thoreau's character and achievements, but, as Laura Dassow Walls writes, "Thoreau has never been captured between covers; he was too quixotic, mischievous, many-sided." Two hundred years after his birth, and two generations after the last full-scale biography, Walls renews Henry David Thoreau for us in all his profound, inspiring complexity. Drawing on Thoreau's copious writings, published and unpublished, Walls presents a Thoreau vigorously alive, full of quirks and contradictions: the young man shattered by the sudden death of his brother; the ambitious Harvard College student; the ecstatic visionary who closed Walden with an account of the regenerative power of the Cosmos. We meet the man whose belief in human freedom and the value of labor made him an uncompromising abolitionist; the solitary walker who found society in nature, but also found his own nature in the society of which he was a deeply interwoven part. And, running through it all, Thoreau the passionate naturalist, who, long before the age of environmentalism, saw tragedy for future generations in the human heedlessness around him. "The Thoreau I sought was not in any book, so I wrote this one," says Walls. The result is a Thoreau unlike any seen since he walked the streets of Concord, a Thoreau for our time and all time. -- Inside jacket flaps.

Contents:

Introduction: land of the grass-ground river

The making of Thoreau. Concord sons and daughters ; Higher learning from Concord to Harvard (1826-1837) ; Transcendental apprentice (1837-1841) ; "Not till we are lost" (1842-1844)

The making of Walden. "Walden, is it you?" (1845-1847) ; A writer's life (1847-1849) ; From Concord to Cosmos: Thoreau's turn to science (1849-1851) ; The beauty of nature, the baseness of men (1852-1854)

Successions. Walden-on-Main (1854-1857) ; Wild fruits (1857-1859) ; A constant new creation (1860-1862).

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780226344690

022634469X

OCLC:

958779908