Henry David Thoreau – 1817-1862

In the 1830s, Thoreau fell under the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson and became his intellectual disciple, contributing to the magazine Emerson had started, The Dial. In 1845, Thoreau built a cabin on Walden Pond, two miles south of Concord, Massachusetts, on land owned by Emerson. He lived there alone, keeping a journal of his thoughts and observations in what became an experiment in stripping life to its essential core.
He lived at the pond for two years, and in 1854 published Walden, a masterpiece of contemplative prose, which combined great nature writing with an internal record of Thoreau’s experiment in living. Although reclusive, Thoreau was hardly disengaged from society. In 1846, he was briefly jailed for failing to pay his poll tax.
He declared that he could not support a government that would wage an unjust war on Mexico (U.S.-Mexican War, 1846–1848), and he wrote his most famous essay, “Civil Disobedience,” which influenced generations of activists, from Gandhi to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.