![]() After graduating, Thoreau drifted between several different teaching posts before becoming immersed in the transcendentalist movement, finding himself a mentor in its leader, Ralph Waldo Emerson. But he was discovered to be gifted at an early age, and his parents scraped together enough money to send him to private schools, including Harvard, where he read voraciously and excelled academically. “His father was a pencil maker, and wasn’t doing very well,” Ward says. “What he did in the book was he took those two years of experiences and condensed them into a work of art.”įor one of the country’s most celebrated writers and philosophers, Thoreau came from humble beginnings. ![]() ![]() “It’s really the most famous vacation in American history,” says David Ward, a historian at the National Portrait Gallery. After two years, two months, and two days in relative solitude, Thoreau left his post on this day in 1847. This work–along with Civil Disobedience, also inspired by his time at the pond–would go on to become one of the most influential writings in American history, sparking political movements from abolitionism to environmentalism to civil rights. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,” he famously wrote in Walden. He settled in a forest on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and built himself a tiny cabin. ![]() ![]() On July 4, 1845, Henry David Thoreau decided it was time to be alone. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |