Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1817; his father ran a small pencil workshop. A graduate of Harvard College, he came home to teach, but resigned rather than flog his pupils. He ran a school with his brother, worked as a land surveyor and improved the process of pencil-making in the family workshop. A disciple of Emerson, he lived for two years in Emerson's house. On 4 July 1845, at twenty-eight, he went to the shore of Walden Pond, on land owned by Emerson, built a small cabin with his own hands and lived there alone for two years and two months. During that time he spent a night in jail for refusing to pay his poll tax. He never married; year after year he walked the woods and hills around Concord, observing and keeping a journal that ran to some two million words. He died of tuberculosis at forty-four.