67 Facts About Thoreau

Thoreau was deeply interested in the idea of survival in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay; at the same time he advocated abandoning waste and illusion in order to discover life's true essential needs.

Thoreau was a lifelong abolitionist, delivering lectures that attacked the fugitive slave law while praising the writings of Wendell Phillips and defending the abolitionist John Brown.

Thoreau had a distinctive appearance, with a nose that he called his "most prominent feature".

Thoreau's paternal grandfather had been born on the UK crown dependency island of Jersey.

Thoreau lived in Hollis Hall and took courses in rhetoric, classics, philosophy, mathematics, and science.

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Thoreau commented, "Let every sheep keep its own skin", a reference to the tradition of using sheepskin vellum for diplomas.

Thoreau's grandfather owned the earliest of the three buildings that were later combined.

Emerson, who was 14 years his senior, took a paternal and at times patron-like interest in Thoreau, advising the young man and introducing him to a circle of local writers and thinkers, including Ellery Channing, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, and Nathaniel Hawthorne and his son Julian Hawthorne, who was a boy at the time.

Emerson urged Thoreau to contribute essays and poems to a quarterly periodical, The Dial, and lobbied the editor, Margaret Fuller, to publish those writings.

Thoreau was a philosopher of nature and its relation to the human condition.

Thoreau returned to Concord and worked in his family's pencil factory, which he would continue to do alongside his writing and other work for most of his adult life.

Thoreau rediscovered the process of making good pencils with inferior graphite by using clay as the binder.

Later, Thoreau converted the pencil factory to produce plumbago, a name for graphite at the time, which was used in the electrotyping process.

Thoreau felt a need to concentrate and work more on his writing.

Thoreau refused because of his opposition to the Mexican–American War and slavery, and he spent a night in jail because of this refusal.

The next day Thoreau was freed when someone, likely to have been his aunt, paid the tax, against his wishes.

Thoreau revised the lecture into an essay titled "Resistance to Civil Government" .

Thoreau had taken up a version of Percy Shelley's principle in the political poem "The Mask of Anarchy", which begins with the powerful images of the unjust forms of authority of his time and then imagines the stirrings of a radically new form of social action.

At Walden Pond, Thoreau completed a first draft of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, an elegy to his brother John, describing their trip to the White Mountains in 1839.

Thoreau self-published the book on the advice of Emerson, using Emerson's publisher, Munroe, who did little to publicize the book.

Thoreau moved out of Emerson's house in July 1848 and stayed at a house on nearby Belknap Street.

Thoreau jested that all he got from this adventure "was a cold".

In 1851, Thoreau became increasingly fascinated with natural history and narratives of travel and expedition.

Thoreau read avidly on botany and often wrote observations on this topic into his journal.

Thoreau admired William Bartram and Charles Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle.

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Thoreau kept detailed observations on Concord's nature lore, recording everything from how the fruit ripened over time to the fluctuating depths of Walden Pond and the days certain birds migrated.

Thoreau became a land surveyor and continued to write increasingly detailed observations on the natural history of the town, covering an area of 26 square miles, in his journal, a two-million-word document he kept for 24 years.

Thoreau observed that squirrels often carry nuts far from the tree from which they fell to create stashes.

Thoreau traveled to Canada East once, Cape Cod four times, and Maine three times; these landscapes inspired his "excursion" books, A Yankee in Canada, Cape Cod, and The Maine Woods, in which travel itineraries frame his thoughts about geography, history and philosophy.

Thoreau was provincial in his own travels, but he read widely about travel in other lands.

Thoreau devoured all the first-hand travel accounts available in his day, at a time when the last unmapped regions of the earth were being explored.

Thoreau read Magellan and James Cook; the arctic explorers John Franklin, Alexander Mackenzie and William Parry; David Livingstone and Richard Francis Burton on Africa; Lewis and Clark; and hundreds of lesser-known works by explorers and literate travelers.

Thoreau processed everything he read, in the local laboratory of his Concord experience.

Thoreau was disgusted by this, and he composed a key speech, A Plea for Captain John Brown, which was uncompromising in its defense of Brown and his actions.

Thoreau's speech proved persuasive: the abolitionist movement began to accept Brown as a martyr, and by the time of the American Civil War entire armies of the North were literally singing Brown's praises.

Thoreau contracted tuberculosis in 1835 and suffered from it sporadically afterwards.

Thoreau's health declined, with brief periods of remission, and he eventually became bedridden.

Thoreau wrote letters and journal entries until he became too weak to continue.

Thoreau's friends were alarmed at his diminished appearance and were fascinated by his tranquil acceptance of death.

Thoreau was buried in the Dunbar family plot; his remains and those of members of his immediate family were eventually moved to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts.

Thoreau was an early advocate of recreational hiking and canoeing, of conserving natural resources on private land, and of preserving wilderness as public land.

Thoreau was not a strict vegetarian, though he said he preferred that diet and advocated it as a means of self-improvement.

Thoreau's philosophy required that he be a didactic arbitrator between the wilderness he based so much on and the spreading mass of humanity in North America.

Thoreau decried the latter endlessly but felt that a teacher needs to be close to those who needed to hear what he wanted to tell them.

Thoreau's expectations were high because he hoped to find genuine, primeval America.

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Thoreau was fervently against slavery and actively supported the abolitionist movement.

Thoreau participated as a conductor in the Underground Railroad, delivered lectures that attacked the Fugitive Slave Law, and in opposition to the popular opinion of the time, supported radical abolitionist militia leader John Brown and his party.

Two weeks after the ill-fated raid on Harpers Ferry and in the weeks leading up to Brown's execution, Thoreau delivered a speech to the citizens of Concord, Massachusetts, in which he compared the American government to Pontius Pilate and likened Brown's execution to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ:.

Thoreau is not Old Brown any longer; he is an angel of light.

Thoreau deemed the evolution from absolute monarchy to limited monarchy to democracy as "a progress toward true respect for the individual" and theorized about further improvements "towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man".

Despotic authority, Thoreau argued, had crushed the people's sense of ingenuity and enterprise; the Canadian habitants had been reduced, in his view, to a perpetual childlike state.

Thoreau favored bioregionalism, the protection of animals and wild areas, free trade, and taxation for schools and highways.

Thoreau disapproved of the subjugation of Native Americans, slavery, technological utopianism, consumerism, philistinism, mass entertainment, and frivolous applications of technology.

Thoreau was aware his Ganges imagery could have been factual.

Thoreau read contemporary works in the new science of biology, including the works of Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Darwin, and Asa Gray .

Thoreau was deeply influenced by Humboldt, especially his work Cosmos.

In 1859, Thoreau purchased and read Darwin's On the Origin of Species.

Unlike many natural historians at the time, including Louis Agassiz who publicly opposed Darwinism in favor of a static view of nature, Thoreau was immediately enthusiastic about the theory of evolution by natural selection and endorsed it, stating:.

Today, Thoreau's words are quoted with feeling by liberals, socialists, anarchists, libertarians, and conservatives alike.

Thoreau's obituary was lumped in with others rather than as a separate article in an 1862 yearbook.

Thoreau influenced many artists and authors including Edward Abbey, Willa Cather, Marcel Proust, William Butler Yeats, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Upton Sinclair, E B White, Lewis Mumford, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alexander Posey, and Gustav Stickley.

The teachings of Thoreau came alive in our civil rights movement; indeed, they are more alive than ever before.

Thoreau's ideas have impacted and resonated with various strains in the anarchist movement, with Emma Goldman referring to him as "the greatest American anarchist".

Additionally, Murray Rothbard, the founder of anarcho-capitalism, has opined that Thoreau was one of the "great intellectual heroes" of his movement.

Globally, Thoreau's concepts held importance within individualist anarchist circles in Spain, France, and Portugal.

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Thoreau himself responded to the criticism in a paragraph of his work Walden by illustrating the irrelevance of their inquiries:.

Many of Thoreau's works were not published during his lifetime, including his journals and numerous unfinished manuscripts.