美國作家亨利·戴維·梭羅誕生。

亨利·戴維·梭羅

亨利·戴維·梭羅（Henry David Thoreau，1817-1862），美國作家、哲學家，著名散文集《瓦爾登湖》和論文《論公民的不服從權利》（又譯為《消極抵抗》、《論公民的不服從》）的作者。
　　1817年7月12日，梭羅出生於麻薩諸塞州的康科德城（Concord, Massachusetts），1837年畢業於哈佛大學，是個品學兼優的學生。畢業後他回到家鄉以教書為業。1841年起他不再教書而轉為寫作。在拉爾夫·沃爾多·愛默生（Ralph Waldo Emerson）的支持下，梭羅在康科德住下並開始了他的超驗主義實踐。這時期，梭羅放棄詩歌創作而開始撰寫隨筆，起先給超驗主義刊物《日規》（Dial）寫稿，其後各地的報紙雜誌上都有他的文章問世。
　　梭羅除了被一些人尊稱為第一個環境保護主義者外，還是一位關注人類生存狀況的有影響的哲學家，他的著名論文《論公民的不服從權利》影響了托爾斯泰和聖雄甘地。
　　1845年7月4日梭羅開始了一項為期兩年的試驗，他移居到離家鄉康科德城（Concord）不遠，優美的瓦爾登湖畔的次生林里，嘗試過一種簡單的隱居生活。他於1847年9月6日離開瓦爾登湖，重新和住在康科德城的他的朋友兼導師拉爾夫·沃爾多·愛默生一家生活在一起。出版於1854年的散文集《瓦爾登湖》（Walden）詳細記載了他在瓦爾登湖畔兩年又兩個月的生涯。雖畢業於世界聞名的哈佛大學，但他沒有選擇經商發財或者從政成為明星，而是平靜地選擇了瓦爾登湖，選擇了心靈的自由和閒適。他搭起木屋，開荒種地，寫作看書，過著非常簡樸、原始的生活。
　　在不同時期，梭羅靠教書與務工過活。他曾經在他家辦的鉛筆廠工作過，還發明了一種可以簡化生產、降低費用的機器。
　　梭羅是拉爾夫·沃爾多·愛默生的學生和朋友，受愛默生的影響，梭羅也是一位先驗主義者。
　　梭羅曾經旅行到過科德角（Cape Cod）、阿基奧科楚科（Agiokochuk） 和緬因州的卡塔丁山（Mt. Katahdin）。其中的緬因州之行到過卡塔丁（Ktaadn）、車桑庫克（Chesuncook）和培諾伯斯科特河（Penobscot River）的東支。
　　梭羅因患肺病1862年5月6日(44歲)死於他的家鄉康科德城，並被葬於馬薩諸賽州康科德城的斯利培山谷公墓（Sleepy Hollow Cemetery）。
　　1845年7月4日美國獨立日這天，28歲的梭羅獨自一人來到距康科德兩英里的瓦爾登湖畔，建了一個小木屋住了下來。並在此之後根據自己在瓦爾登湖的生活觀察與思考，整理並發表了兩本著作，即《康考德和梅里馬克河上的一周》（A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers）和《瓦爾登湖》（Walden）。
　　在瓦爾登湖生活期間，因為梭羅反對黑奴制（Negro Slavery）拒交“人頭稅”而被捕入獄。雖然他只在獄中蹲了一宿就被友人在未經他本人同意的情況下，替他代交了稅款保其出獄，但這一夜卻激發他思考了許多問題。出來後曾有一些市民問他這樣一個問題，為什麼有許多人寧願坐牢也不願意交稅。為解釋這一問題，他結合自己的親身體驗，寫成了著名的政論《抵制國民政府》（Resistance to Civil Government，後改名為Civil Disobedience）。他所宣傳的這種依靠個人的力量，“非暴力抵抗”的鬥爭形式對印度的甘地和美國黑人領袖馬丁·路德·金產生了很大的影響。
　　1947年，梭羅結束了離群索居的生活，回到原來的村落。他仍然保持著自己簡樸的生活風格，將主要精力投入寫作、講課和觀察當地的植物動物。有時候為了得到極其微薄的生活費用，才偶爾離開村子到父親的鉛筆廠工作一些日子。梭羅卒於1862年5月6日，時年44歲。當時在同時代人的眼中，他只不過是一個觀念偏執行為怪異的人，一個愛默生的追求者而已。一直到世紀之交他及其著作才得到了廣泛和深刻的認識。
　　梭羅於1837年剛進大學時就曾言，他要將聖經中關於一周工作六天休息一天的教義，改為工作一天休息六天。他在瓦爾登湖的生活經歷實現了這一願望。在那裡他僅花28美元多一點兒就建成起了自己的棲身的小木屋，每星期花27美分就足以維持生活。為維持這樣簡樸的生活，他一年只須工作六個星期就可以掙足一年的生活費用，剩下的46個星期去做自己喜歡做的事情。他沒有將這寶貴時光浪費掉，而是把它奉獻給寫作和自然研究。也許有人會說梭羅太懶，終其一生也並未做出任何驚天動地的事業，但是如果你能注意到他在短暫的一生中創作了二十多部一流的散文集時，就會對他的才華和勤奮發出由衷的讚賞。
　　19世紀美國最具有世界影響力的作家、哲學家;梭羅在生前只出過兩本書.第一本是他在1849年自費出版的《康科德河和梅里麥克河上的一星期》,此書是他在瓦爾登湖邊的木屋裡著寫的,內容是哥兒倆在兩兩條河上旅行的一星期中大段大段議論文史哲學和宗教等等.雖精雕細刻,卻晦澀難懂,沒有引起什麼反響,印行1000多冊,售出100多冊送掉75冊,存下700多冊,在書店倉庫放到1853年,全部腿給了作者,作者本人梭羅曾還詼諧地說:我家裡大約藏書900多冊,其中自己著的就有700多冊.第二本就是《瓦爾登湖》了,於1854年出版,150年來風行天下，不知出版了多少個版本。他強調親近自然、學習自然、熱愛自然，追求“簡單些，再簡單些”的質樸生活，提倡短暫人生因思想豐盈而臻於完美。他投入數十載的時間對野生果實、野草及森林演替進行觀察研究，寫出了《種子的信念》一書。
　　School/tradition Transcendentalism
　　Main interests Natural history
　　Notable ideas Abolitionism, tax resistance, development criticism, civil disobedience, conscientious objection, direct action, environmentalism, nonviolent resistance, simple living
　　Influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson
　　Influenced Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, William O. Douglas, Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy
　　Henry David Thoreau (12 July 1817 – 6 May 1862; born David Henry Thoreau)[1] was an American author, naturalist, transcendentalist, tax resister, development critic, philosopher, and abolitionist who is best known for Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay, Civil Disobedience, an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state.
　　Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry total over 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions were his writings on natural history and philosophy, where he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern day environmentalism.
　　He 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’s philosophy of nonviolent resistance influenced the political thoughts and actions of such later figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr.
　　Thoreau is sometimes cited as an individualist anarchist[2][3] as well as an inspiration to anarchists. Though Civil Disobedience calls for improving rather than abolishing government — “I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government”[4] — the direction of this improvement aims at anarchism: “‘That government is best which governs not at all;’ and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.”[4]
著作列表Works
　　* The Service (1840)
　　* A Walk to Wachusett (1842)
　　* Paradise (to be) Regained (1843)
　　* The Landlord (1843) [1] [2]
　　* Sir Walter Raleigh (1844)
　　* Herald of Freedom (1844)
　　* Wendell Phillips Before the Concord Lyceum (1845)
　　* Reform and the Reformers (1846-8)
　　* Thomas Carlyle and His Works (1847)
　　* 康科德河和梅里麥克河上的一個星期A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849，1839年？) [3]
　　* 論公民的不服從權利Resistance to Civil Government, or Civil Disobedience (1849) [4]
　　* An Excursion to Canada (1853) [5]
　　* 麻薩諸塞州的奴隸制度Slavery in Massachusetts (1854)
　　* 瓦爾登湖Walden (1854)
　　* 為約翰·布朗上校請願A Plea for Captain John Brown (1859，1860年？)
　　* Remarks After the Hanging of John Brown (1859)
　　* The Last Days of John Brown (1860)
　　* Walking (1861) [6] [7]
　　* Autumnal Tints (1862) [8]
　　* Wild Apples: The History of the Apple Tree (1862) [9][10]
　　* 遠足Excursions (1863) [11]
　　* Life Without Principle (1863) [12] [13]
　　* Night and Moonlight (1863) [14] [15]
　　* The Highland Light (1864) [16]
　　* 緬因森林The Maine Woods (1864) [17] [18]
　　* 科德角Cape Cod (1865) [19]
　　* Letters to Various Persons (1865) [20]
　　* A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers (1866) [21]
　　* 麻薩諸塞州的早春Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881)
　　* 夏Summer (1884) [22]
　　* 冬Winter (1888) [23]
　　* 秋Autumn (1892) [24]
　　* 雜錄Misellanies (1894)
　　* Familiar Letters of Henry David Thoreau (1894) [25]
　　* Poems of Nature (1895)
　　* Some Unpublished Letters of Henry D. and Sophia E. Thoreau (1898)
　　* 梭羅最初與最後的旅行（最近發現於梭羅未發表的日記和手稿中）The First and Last Journeys of Thoreau (1905) Vol. 1 Vol. 2
　　* Journal of Henry David Thoreau (1906) [26]
站外連結
　　* Wikiquote - Quotes by Henry David Thoreau
　　* 一本靜靜的書—《瓦爾登湖》譯序 徐遲（其中有梭羅的生平介紹）（http://www.booker.com.cn/gb/paper17/8/class001700003/hwz59324.htm）
　　* 梭羅 史蒂芬·哈恩 著，王艷芳 譯，彭國華 校 （其中有梭羅生平的詳細介紹）（http://www.cass.net.cn/chinese/s14_zxs/facu/wangyanfang/zhicheng/shu.htm）
　　* 瓦爾登湖—林中生活散記 句承蜩（http://www.booker.com.cn/gb/paper18/47/class001800010/hwz212736.htm）
Early life and education
　　Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts to John Thoreau (a pencil maker) and Cynthia Dunbar. His paternal grandfather was of French origin and born in Jersey.[5] His maternal grandfather, Asa Dunbar, was known for leading Harvard's 1766 student Butter Rebellion[6] the first recorded student protest in the United States.[7] David Henry was named after a recently deceased paternal uncle, David Thoreau. He did not become “Henry David” until after college, although he never petitioned to make a legal name change.[8] He had two older siblings, Helen and John Jr., and a younger sister, Sophia.[9] Thoreau’s birthplace still exists on Virginia Road in Concord and is currently the focus of preservation efforts. The house is original, but it now stands about 100 yards away from its first site.
　　Bronson Alcott and Thoreau's aunt both wrote that “Thoreau” is pronounced like the word “thorough”, whose standard American pronunciation rhymes with “furrow”.[10] In appearance he was homely, with a nose that he called “my most prominent feature.”[11] Of his face, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote: [Thoreau] is as ugly as sin, long-nosed, queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and rustic, though courteous manners, corresponding very well with such an exterior. But his ugliness is of an honest and agreeable fashion, and becomes him much better than beauty.[12] Thoreau also wore a neck-beard for many years, which he insisted many women found attractive. However, Louisa May Alcott reportedly mentioned to Emerson that Thoreau's facial hair will most assuredly deflect amorous advances and preserve the man's virtue in perpetuity.[13]
　　Thoreau studied at Harvard University between 1833 and 1837. He lived in Hollis Hall and took courses in rhetoric, classics, philosophy, mathematics, and science. Legend states that Thoreau refused to pay the five-dollar fee for a Harvard diploma. In fact, the master's degree he declined to purchase had no academic merit: Harvard College offered it to graduates who proved their physical worth by being alive three years after graduating, and their saving, earning, or inheriting quality or condition by having Five Dollars to give the college.[14] His comment was: “Let every sheep keep its own skin.”
Return to Concord: 1837-1841
　　During a leave of absence from Harvard in 1835, Thoreau taught school in Canton, Massachusetts. After graduating in 1837, he joined the faculty of Concord Academy, but he refused to administer corporal punishment and the school board soon dismissed him. He and his brother John then opened a grammar school in Concord in 1838. They introduced several progressive concepts, including nature walks and visits to local shops and businesses. The school ended when John became fatally ill from tetanus in 1842.[15]
　　Upon graduation Thoreau returned home to Concord, where he befriended Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson took a paternal and at times patronizing 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, Nathaniel Hawthorne and his son Julian, who was a boy at the time. Of the many prominent authors who lived in Concord, Thoreau was the only town native. Emerson referred to him as the man of Concord.
　　Emerson constantly urged Thoreau to contribute essays and poems to a quarterly periodical, The Dial, and Emerson lobbied with editor Margaret Fuller to publish those writings. Thoreau’s first essay published there was Natural History of Massachusetts; half book review, half natural history essay, it appeared in 1842. It consisted of revised passages from his journal, which he had begun keeping at Emerson’s suggestion. The first entry on 22 October 1837 reads, “‘What are you doing now?’ he asked. ‘Do you keep a journal?’ So I make my first entry today.”
　　Thoreau was a philosopher of nature and its relation to the human condition. In his early years he followed Transcendentalism, a loose and eclectic idealist philosophy advocated by Emerson, Fuller, and Alcott. They held that an ideal spiritual state transcends, or goes beyond, the physical and empirical, and that one achieves that insight via personal intuition rather than religious doctrine. In their view, Nature is the outward sign of inward spirit, expressing the “radical correspondence of visible things and human thoughts,” as Emerson wrote in Nature (1836).
　　（1967 U.S. postage stamp honoring Thoreau.）
　　On 18 April 1841, Thoreau moved into the Emerson House.[16] There, from 1841-1844, he served as the children’s tutor, editorial assistant, and repair man/gardener. For a few months in 1843, he moved to the home of William Emerson on Staten Island, tutoring the family sons while writing for New York periodicals, aided in part by his future literary representative Horace Greeley.
　　Thoreau returned to Concord and worked in his family's pencil factory, which he would continue to do for most of his adult life. He rediscovered the process to make a good pencil out of inferior graphite by using clay as the binder; this invention improved upon graphite found in New Hampshire in 1821 by Charles Dunbar. (The process of mixing graphite and clay, known as the Conté process, was patented by Nicolas-Jacques Conté in 1795.) Later, Thoreau converted the factory to produce plumbago (graphite), used to ink typesetting machines.[17] Frequent contact with minute particles of graphite may have weakened his lungs already damaged by tuberculosis.
　　Once back in Concord, Thoreau went through a restless period. In April 1844 he and his friend Edward Hoar accidentally set a fire that consumed 300 acres of Walden Woods.[18] He spoke often of finding a farm to buy or lease, which he felt would give him a means to support himself while also providing enough solitude to write his first book.
　　Civil disobedience and the Walden years: 1845–1849 （A reproduction of Thoreau’s cabin with a statue of Thoreau.）
　　Thoreau embarked on a two-year experiment in simple living on 4 July 1845, when he moved to a small self-built house on land owned by Emerson in a second-growth forest around the shores of Walden Pond. The house was not in wilderness but at the edge of town, 1.5 miles (2.4 km) from his family home.
　　On 24 or 25 July 1846, Thoreau ran into the local tax collector, Sam Staples, who asked him to pay six years of delinquent poll taxes. 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, over his protests, when his aunt paid his taxes.[19]) The experience had a strong impact on Thoreau. In January and February of 1848, he delivered lectures on The Rights and Duties of the Individual in relation to Government”[20] explaining his tax resistance at the Concord Lyceum. Bronson Alcott attended the lecture, and wrote in his journal on 26 January,
　　Heard Thoreau’s lecture before the Lyceum on the relation of the individual to the State — an admirable statement of the rights of the individual to self-government, and an attentive audience. His allusions to the Mexican War, to Mr. Hoar’s expulsion from Carolina, his own imprisonment in Concord Jail for refusal to pay his tax, Mr. Hoar’s payment of mine when taken to prison for a similar refusal, were all pertinent, well considered, and reasoned. I took great pleasure in this deed of Thoreau’s.[21]
　　Thoreau revised the lecture into an essay entitled Resistance to Civil Government (also known as Civil Disobedience). In May 1849 it was published by Elizabeth Peabody in the Aesthetic Papers.
　　Thoreau is frequently quoted as espousing that the true place for a just man is in prison. He in fact actually writes in Civil Disobedience, Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.[22]
　　At Walden Pond, he completed a first draft of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, an elegy to his brother, John, that described their 1839 trip to the White Mountains. Thoreau did not find a publisher for this book and instead printed 1,000 copies at his own expense, though less than 300 sold.[23] Thoreau self-published on the advice of Emerson, using Emerson’s own publisher Munroe, who did little to publicize the book. Its failure put Thoreau into debt that took years to pay off, and Emerson’s flawed advice caused a schism between the friends that never entirely healed.
　　In August 1846, Thoreau briefly left Walden to make a trip to Mount Katahdin in Maine, a journey later recorded in “Ktaadn,” the first part of The Maine Woods.
　　Thoreau left Walden Pond on 6 September 1847.[24] Over several years, he worked to pay off his debts and also continuously revised his manuscript. In 1854, he published Walden, or Life in the Woods, recounting the two years, two months, and two days he had spent at Walden Pond. The book compresses that time into a single calendar year, using the passage of four seasons to symbolize human development. Part memoir and part spiritual quest, Walden at first won few admirers, but today critics regard it as a classic American book that explores natural simplicity, harmony, and beauty as models for just social and cultural conditions.
Late years: 1851-1862
　　（Henry David Thoreau, photograph published circa 1879）
　　In 1851, Thoreau became increasingly fascinated with natural history and travel/expedition narratives. He read avidly on botany and often wrote observations on this topic into his Journal. He greatly admired William Bartram and Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle. He 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. The point of this task was to “anticipate” the seasons of nature, in his words.
　　He became a land surveyor, and continued to write increasingly detailed natural history observations about the 26 mile² (67 km²) township in his Journal, a two-million word document he kept for 24 years. He also kept a series of separate notebooks, and these observations became the source for Thoreau's late natural history writings, such as Autumnal Tints, The Succession of Trees, and Wild Apples, an essay bemoaning the destruction of indigenous and wild apple species.
　　Until the 1970s, Thoreau’s late pursuits were dismissed by literary critics as amateur science and philosophy. With the rise of environmental history and ecocriticism, several new readings of this matter began to emerge, showing Thoreau to be both a philosopher and an analyst of ecological patterns in fields and woodlots. For instance, his late essay, The Succession of Forest Trees, shows that he used experimentation and analysis to explain how forests regenerate after fire or human destruction, through dispersal by seed-bearing winds or animals.
　　He traveled to Quebec 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. Other travels took him southwest to Philadelphia and New York City in 1854, and west across the Great Lakes region in 1861, visiting Niagara Falls, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Mackinac Island.[25]
　　After John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry, many prominent voices in the abolitionist movement distanced themselves from Brown, or damned him with faint praise. Thoreau was disgusted by this, and composed a speech — A Plea for Captain John Brown — which was uncompromising in its defense of Brown and his actions. Thoreau’s speech proved persuasive: first the abolitionist movement began to accept Brown as a martyr, and by the time of the American Civil War entire armies of the North would literally be singing Brown’s praises. As a contemporary biographer of John Brown put it: “If, as Alfred Kazin suggests, without John Brown there would have been no Civil War, we would add that without the Concord Transcendentalists, John Brown would have had little cultural impact.”[26]
Death
　　（Thoreau family graves at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery）
　　Thoreau first contracted tuberculosis in 1835 and suffered from it sporadically over his life. In 1859, following a late night excursion to count the rings of tree stumps during a rain storm, he became ill with bronchitis. His health declined over three years with brief periods of remission, until he eventually became bedridden. Recognizing the terminal nature of his disease, Thoreau spent his last years revising and editing his unpublished works, particularly The Maine Woods and Excursions, and petitioning publishers to print revised editions of A Week and Walden. He also wrote letters and journal entries until he became too weak to continue. His friends were alarmed at his diminished appearance and fascinated by his tranquil acceptance of death. When his aunt Louisa asked him in his last weeks if he had made his peace with God, Thoreau responded quite simply: “I did not know we had ever quarreled.” He died on 6 May 1862 at the age of 44.
　　Originally buried in the Dunbar family plot, he and members of his immediate family were eventually moved to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts. Emerson wrote the eulogy spoken at his funeral. Thoreau’s friend Ellery Channing published his first biography, Thoreau the Poet-Naturalist, in 1873, and Channing and another friend Harrison Blake edited some poems, essays, and journal entries for posthumous publication in the 1890s. Thoreau’s Journal, often mined but largely unpublished at his death, first appeared in 1906 and helped to build his modern reputation. A new and greatly expanded edition of the Journal is underway, published by Princeton University Press. Today, Thoreau is regarded as one of the foremost American writers, both for the modern clarity of his prose style and the prescience of his views on nature and politics. His memory is honored by the international Thoreau Society, the oldest and largest society devoted to an American author.
Beliefs
　　（Thoreau memorial at Library Way, New York City.）Thoreau was an early advocate of recreational hiking and canoing, of conserving natural resources on private land, and of preserving wilderness as public land. Thoreau was also one of the first American supporters of Darwin's theory of evolution. He was not a strict vegetarian, though he said he preferred that diet[27] and advocated it as a means of self-improvement. He wrote in Walden: The practical objection to animal food in my case was its uncleanness; and besides, when I had caught and cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me essentially. It was insignificant and unnecessary, and cost more than it came to. A little bread or a few potatoes would have done as well, with less trouble and filth.[28]
　　Thoreau neither rejected civilization nor fully embraced wilderness. Instead he sought a middle ground, the pastoral realm that integrates both nature and culture. The wildness he enjoyed was the nearby swamp or forest, and he preferred “partially cultivated country.” His idea of being “far in the recesses of the wilderness” of Maine was to “travel the logger’s path and the Indian trail,” but he also hiked on pristine untouched land. In the essay Henry David Thoreau, Philosopher Roderick Nash writes: Thoreau left Concord in 1846 for the first of three trips to northern Maine. His expectations were high because he hoped to find genuine, primeval America. But contact with real wilderness in Maine affected him far differently than had the idea of wilderness in Concord. Instead of coming out of the woods with a deepened appreciation of the wilds, Thoreau felt a greater respect for civilization and realized the necessity of balance.[29]
　　On alcohol, Thoreau wrote: I would fain keep sober always... I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man; wine is not so noble a liquor... Of all ebriosity, who does not prefer to be intoxicated by the air he breathes?[28]
Influence
　　（A bust of Thoreau from the Hall of Fame for Great Americans at the Bronx Community College.）
　　Thoreau’s writings had far reaching influences on many public figures. Political leaders and reformers like Mahatma Gandhi, President John F. Kennedy, civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr., Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, and Russian author Leo Tolstoy all spoke of being strongly affected by Thoreau’s work, particularly Civil Disobedience. So did many artists and authors including Edward Abbey, Willa Cather, Marcel Proust, William Butler Yeats, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, E. B. White, and Frank Lloyd Wright and naturalists like John Burroughs, John Muir, E.O. Wilson, Edwin Way Teale, Joseph Wood Krutch , B.F Skinner, and David Brower.[30] Anarchist and feminist Emma Goldman also appreciated Thoreau, and referred to him as “the greatest American anarchist”.
　　Mahatma Gandhi first read Walden in 1906 while working as a civil rights activist in Johannesburg, South Africa. He told American reporter Webb Miller, [Thoreau's] ideas influenced me greatly. I adopted some of them and recommended the study of Thoreau to all of my friends who were helping me in the cause of Indian Independence. Why I actually took the name of my movement from Thoreau's essay 'On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,' written about 80 years ago.[31]
　　Martin Luther King, Jr. noted in his Autobiography that his first encounter with the idea of non-violent resistance was reading On Civil Disobedience in 1944 while attending Morehouse College. He wrote in his autobiography that it was
　　Here, in this courageous New Englander's refusal to pay his taxes and his choice of jail rather than support a war that would spread slavery's territory into Mexico, I made my first contact with the theory of nonviolent resistance. Fascinated by the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil system, I was so deeply moved that I reread the work several times.
　　I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. No other person has been more eloquent and passionate in getting this idea across than Henry David Thoreau. As a result of his writings and personal witness, we are the heirs of a legacy of creative protest. The teachings of Thoreau came alive in our civil rights movement; indeed, they are more alive than ever before. Whether expressed in a sit-in at lunch counters, a freedom ride into Mississippi, a peaceful protest in Albany, Georgia, a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, these are outgrowths of Thoreau's insistence that evil must be resisted and that no moral man can patiently adjust to injustice.[32]
　　The University of Michigan's New England Literature Program is an experiential literature and writing program run through the university's Department of English Language and Literature which was started in the 1970's by professors Alan Howes and Walter Clark. Howes and Clark called upon Thoreauvian ideals of nature, independence and community to create an academic program modeled after Thoreau's experiment at Walden Pond. Today, students at NELP study Thoreau's work — as well as that of several other New England writers from the 19th and 20th centuries — in relative isolation on Sebago Lake in Raymond, Maine.
　　American Psychologist B. F. Skinner wrote that he carried a copy of Thoreau's Walden with him in his youth[33] and, in 1945, wrote Walden Two, a fictional utopia about 1,000 members of a community living together inspired by the life of Thoreau.[34]
Criticism
　　Thoreau was not without his critics. Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson judged Thoreau’s endorsement of living alone in natural simplicity, apart from modern society, to be a mark of effeminacy:
　　…Thoreau’s content and ecstasy in living was, we may say, like a plant that he had watered and tended with womanish solicitude; for there is apt to be something unmanly, something almost dastardly, in a life that does not move with dash and freedom, and that fears the bracing contact of the world. In one word, Thoreau was a skulker. He did not wish virtue to go out of him among his fellow-men, but slunk into a corner to hoard it for himself. He left all for the sake of certain virtuous self-indulgences.[35]
　　However, English novelist George Eliot, writing in the Westminster Review, characterized such critics as uninspired and narrow-minded:
　　People — very wise in their own eyes — who would have every man’s life ordered according to a particular pattern, and who are intolerant of every existence the utility of which is not palpable to them, may pooh-pooh Mr. Thoreau and this episode in his history, as unpractical and dreamy.
See also
　　* The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, a project that aims to provide accurate texts of Thoreau's works
　　* Concord Museum, which contains many of Thoreau's possessions
　　* The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail, a two-act play by Robert Edwin Lee and Jerome Lawrence.
References
　　1. Biography of Henry David Thoreau, American Poems (2000-2007 Gunnar Bengtsson).
　　2. Johnson, Ellwood. The Goodly Word: The Puritan Influence in America Literature, Clements Publishing, 2005, p. 138.
　　3. Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, edited by Edwin Robert Anderson Seligman, Alvin Saunders Johnson, 1937, p. 12.
　　4. a b Thoreau, H. D. Resistance to Civil Government
　　5. Ancestors of Mary Ann Gillam and Stephen Old
　　6. History of the Fraternity System
　　7. Trivia-Library
　　8. Henry David Thoreau, Meet the Writers, Barnes & Noble.com
　　9. Biography of Henry David Thoreau, American Poems (2000-2007 Gunnar Bengtsson)
　　10. THUR-oh or Thor-OH? And How Do We Know? Thoreau Reader
　　11. Thoreau, H.D. Cape Cod
　　12. American Notebooks Nathaniel Hawthorne
　　13. Colman, William, et al, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson 16 vols. (Cambridge, Mass 1960-)
　　14. Thoreau's Diploma. American Literature Vol. 17, May 1945. 174-175.
　　15. Dean, Bradley P. A Thoreau Chronology.
　　16. Cheevers, Susan (2006). American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau; Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work. Detroit: Thorndike Press. Large print edition. p. 90. ISBN 078629521X.
　　17. Conrad, Randall. (Fall 2005). The Machine in the Wetland: Re-imagining Thoreau's Plumbago-Grinder. Thoreau Society Bulletin (253).
　　18. A Chronology of Thoreau's Life, with Events of the Times, The Thoreau Project, Calliope Film Resources, accessed 11th June 2007
　　19. Rosenwald, Lawrence. The Theory, Practice & Influence of Thoreau's Civil Disobedience. William Cain, ed. A Historical Guide to Henry David Thoreau. Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 2006.
　　20. Thoreau, H. D. letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson 23 February 1848
　　21. Alcott, Bronson. Journals. Boston: Little, Brown, 1938.
　　22. Thoreau's Civil Disobedience - 2
　　23. Cheevers, Susan (2006). American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau; Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work. Detroit: Thorndike Press. Large print edition. p. 234. ISBN 078629521X.
　　24. Cheevers, Susan (2006). American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau; Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work. Detroit: Thorndike Press. Large print edition. p. 244. ISBN 078629521X.
　　25. Henry David Thoreau, The Annotated Walden (1970), Philip Van Doren Stern, ed., pp. 96, 132
　　26. Reynolds, David S. John Brown, Abolitionist Knopf (2005), p. 4
　　27. Brooks, Van Wyck. The Flowering of New England. New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, Inc., 1952. p. 310
　　28. a b Cheevers, Susan (2006). American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau; Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work. Detroit: Thorndike Press. Large print edition. p. 241. ISBN 078629521X.
　　29. http://www.wsu.edu/~hughesc/thoreau.htmHenry David Thoreau, Philosopher by Roderick Nash
　　30. Kifer, Ken Analysis and Notes on Walden: Henry Thoreau’s Text with Adjacent Thoreauvian Commentary
　　31. Miller, Webb. I Found No Peace. Garden City, 1938. 238-239
　　32. King, M.L. Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. chapter two
　　33. Skinner, B. F. A Matter of Consequences
　　34. Skinner, B. F. Walden Two (1948)
　　35. Stevenson, Robert Louis. Henry David Thoreau: His Character and Opinions. Cornhill Magazine. June 1880.
　　[edit] Further reading
　　* Henry David Thoreau: A Week, Walden, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod (Robert F. Sayre, ed.) (Library of America, 1985) ISBN 978-0-94045027-1
　　* Henry David Thoreau: Collected Essays and Poems (Elizabeth Hall Witherell, ed.) (Library of America, 2001) ISBN 978-1-88301195-6
　　* Henry David Thoreau: The Price of Freedom: Excerpts from Thoreau’s Journals ISBN 978-1434805522
　　* Bode, Carl. Best of Thoreau's Journals. Southern Illinois University Press. 1967.
　　* Botkin, Daniel. No Man's Garden.
　　* Dassow Walls, Laura. Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and 19th Century Science. University of Wisconsin Press. 1995. ISBN 978-0-29914740-2
　　* Dean, Bradley P. ed., Letters to a Spiritual Seeker. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004.
　　* Harding, Walter. The Days of Henry Thoreau. Princeton University Press, 1982.
　　* Hendrix, George. The Influence of Thoreau's Civil Disobedience on Gandhi's Satyagraha. The New England Quarterly. 1956.
　　* Howarth, William. The Book of Concord: Thoreau's Life as a Writer. Viking Press, 1982.
　　* Meyerson, Joel et al. The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau. Cambridge University Press. 1995.
　　* Nash, Roderick. Henry David Thoreau, Philosopher.
　　* Parrington, Vernon. Main Current in American Thought. V 2 online. 1927.
　　* Petroski, Henry. H. D. Thoreau, Engineer. American Heritage of Invention and Technology, Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 8-16.
External links
　　Texts
　　* The Thoreau Reader. The annotated works of Henry David Thoreau.
　　* Thoreau's Life & Writings, at the Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods.
　　* Works by Henry David Thoreau at Project Gutenberg. Text and HTML.
　　* Works by Henry David Thoreau at Internet Archive. Scanned books.
　　* Works by Henry David Thoreau at Google Books. Scanned books.
　　* Thoreau's Journal Drippings; a Monthly Digest of Excerpts from Thoreau's Journal
　　* Excerpts from Thoreau’s Journals (relating to political philosophy)
　　* Poems of Thoreau
　　Other
　　* This Date From Henry David Thoreau's Journal
　　* Who He Was & Why He Matters — by Randall Conrad
　　* http://hdthoreau.com
　　* The Birthplace of Thoreau
　　* The Blog of Henry David Thoreau
　　* The Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods
　　* World Wide Waldens at The Walden Woods Project
　　* Henry David Thoreau Online The Works and Life of Henry D. Thoreau
　　* Henry David Thoreau (“The Transcendentalists”)
　　* The American Transcendentalist Web
　　* Thoreau Project at Calliope
　　* The Thoreau Society
　　* The Thoreau Edition
　　* Concordance to works of Thoreau at Victorian Literary Studies Archive
　　* John Updike, “A Sage for All Seasons” — courtesy of the UK Guardian, an edited extract from the introduction to Updike’s new edition of Walden
　　* Henry David Thoreau entry at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy by Rick Anthony Furtak, 2005-06-30
　　* Henry Thoreau: Transcendental Economist from Vernon L. Parrington’s Main Currents in American Thought
　　* Stephen Ells’s Thoreau research page
　　* The European Thoreau web page: multilingual resources for Thoreauvians
　　* Thoreau's trails
　　* Strike The Root, a website that draws its inspiration from Henry D. Thoreau.