Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was born and died in Concord, Massachusetts, and rarely left it. After Harvard he taught school, worked in his family’s pencil business, surveyed land and lived for two years (1845–47) in a cabin he built at Walden Pond on land belonging to his friend Emerson. Only two books appeared in his lifetime, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and Walden (1854); his essay on civil disobedience (1849) and his vast journal were recognised later. He died of tuberculosis at forty-four.