Henry David Thoreau

“He was born on a colonial-era farm into a subsistence economy based on agriculture, on land that had sustained a stable Anglo- American community for two centuries and, before that, Native American communities for eleven thousand years. People had been shaping Thoreau's landscape since the melting of the glaciers. By the time he died, in 1862, the Industrial Revolution had reshaped his world: the railroad transformed Concord from a local economy of small farms and artisanal industries to a suburban node on a global network of industrial farms and factories. His beloved woods had been cleared away, and the rural rivers he sailed in his youth powered cotton mills. In 1843, the railroad cut right across a corner of Walden Pond, but in 1845 Thoreau built his house there anyway, to confront the railroad as part of his reality. By the time he left Walden, at least twenty passenger and freight trains screeched past his house daily. His response was to call on his neighbors to "simplify, simplify. Instead of joining the rush to earn more money for the latest gadgets and goods from China, Europe, or the West Indies -feeding an economy that grew mindlessly, he wrote, like rank and noxious weeds - he called for mindful cultivation of one's inner being and one's greater community, a spiritual rather than material growth through education, art, music, and philosophy. When he wrote that "a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone," he meant not an ascetic's renunciation, but a redefinition of true wealth as inner rather than outer, aspiring to turn life itself, even the simplest acts of life, into a form of art. "There is Thoreau," said one of his closest friends. "Give him sunshine, and a handful of nuts, and he has enough."”


Henry David Thoreau: A life by Laura Dassow Walls

Thoreau trivia from book: 

Walden could have been named Flint pond, after the family that owned it before Emerson, or maybe it was the next pond over.

Saffron Walden was the town some of Thoreau’s family came from.

Thoreau measured Walden Pond to be 102 feet deep.

Thoreau was of Huguenot extraction unlike the Puritan English around him.

His father died when he was 14 but lawyers and creditors drained the estate. His mother died earlier, and he was left with a stepmother, and 7 siblings.