1. Henry David Thoreau
English 11 Honors

2. Relationship with Emerson
14 years younger than Ralph Waldo Emerson
Emerson encouraged Thoreau as a writer and suggested he focus on the natural world.
They shared the same political attitudes about slavery
Emerson delivered the eulogy at Thoreau’s funeral: “No truer American existed than Thoreau.”

3. An age of social experimentation
Like the 1960s, the 1840s saw a number of experiments with communes.
Thoreau’s stay at Walden Pond is a more solitary response to this same impulse towards social experimentation.

4. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life….”
Built a cabin on property owned by Emerson and moved in on July 4, 1845
Lived economically and comfortably for two years and two months
Experiment in self- reliance, but not a flight from society

5. “Simplify, simplify.”
Like Emerson, Thoreau was profoundly skeptical of the division of labor.
He believed that the complexity and specialization of labor and commerce rob of us any command of our own lives.
“if some have the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the misfortune of being ridden upon.”

6. “By working about six weeks in a year, I could meet all the expenses of living.”
Growing his own food and building his own shelter, gave him freedom to work productively as a writer and thinker
He saw a profound connection between self- reliance, meaningful labor, and thought

7. “I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.”
While living at Walden Pond, Thoreau was arrested and briefly jailed for not paying his poll tax.
His essay on the experience, “Civil Disobedience,” explores the question of what a person should do when he or she feels that his government is acting immorally.

8. Crosspollination
Like Emerson, Thoreau avidly studied the Hindu scriptures of India.
Mahatma Gandhi studied Thoreau’s writings on civil disobedience as he led India’s struggle for independence.
Martin Luther King, Jr. based many of his ideas on nonviolent action on the work of Gandhi who, in turn, influenced Nelson Mandela.