Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) was an American writer, poet, philosopher, naturalist, abolitionist, and one of the pioneers of modern environmental thought. He was born in Concord, Massachusetts, the third of four children in a family of pencil makers. He studied Natural History, Mathematics, and Philosophy at Harvard University. Rejecting the authoritarian methods of the educational system of his time, he resigned from his teaching position because he refused to use corporal punishment on his students. Together with his brother John, he founded an innovative school where learning was combined with walks and observations in nature. The school closed after John's untimely death in 1842.
Four years later, Thoreau withdrew from conventional society and spent more than two years living alone in a small cabin beside Walden Pond, seeking a simple life in harmony with nature.
From this experience emerged his masterpiece, Walden, in which he argues that people are trapped by false ideas about what they need in order to live, spending their lives in what he famously called "quiet desperation." He asks what human beings truly need. Are our needs those imposed by an industrial society that demands ever greater labor and ever greater consumption? Thoreau offers no rigid doctrine, but he reduces humanity's essential needs to four: food, shelter, clothing, and fuel. Once these basic necessities are secured and unnecessary desires set aside, human beings are free to pursue their intellectual and spiritual fulfillment. Throughout his life he sought a way of living in which economic activity would support, rather than hinder, the full development of the human spirit.
Thoreau was one of the most original American writers and thinkers of the nineteenth century. An uncompromising advocate of individual conscience and personal freedom, he became one of the leading voices of philosophical anarchism. In 1846 he refused to pay the poll tax in protest against slavery and the Mexican–American War, an act that led to his brief imprisonment.
After his release, he wrote his influential essay Civil Disobedience, a work that would later inspire figures such as Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela. A passionate opponent of slavery, he openly supported the abolitionist John Brown and defended him after his arrest following the raid on Harpers Ferry. Thoreau died of tuberculosis in 1862 at the age of forty-four, leaving behind a body of work whose influence on literature, philosophy, political thought, and environmentalism continues to grow.
