Harrison Blake could be considered Thoreau's first disciple. He invited Thoreau to talk in his house in Worcester, and was his literary executor after his death. Blake's letters don't survive, but Thoreau's letters to him survive (see link below).
To get a disciple also spurred Thoreau to write. He wrote about Thomas Carlyle. Horace Greeley got the essay published and hassled the publishers to actually pay Thoreau. He wanted essays on Emerson and Hawthorne, but he ended up writing about Walden, and used those lectures as chapters in his book.
I thought publishing was hard in this day and age, and yet, I can self publish this blog. Thoreau wrote Greeley about the Walden experiment, and he published his short note in his paper, and that might have brought him a little fame. Thoreau put an essay into a Peabody journal and that journal folded. He renamed the essay Civil Disobedience and of course it's read around the world now.
Things I could study more: These letters, the essays, the journal, Thomas Carlyle. I really need to read more Thoreau, maybe A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. This is my problem with reading, there are too many tributaries to row upstream, and too many veins to mine.. I should just finish the biography.
Thoreau amends no government to better government. I almost feel like since his time we're working to refine just what government is good for. Building roads, taking away garbage, educating citizens, public transport. People bitch like their bitching will get more or swear off government because they are disappointed, but honestly good government is the aim, not no government.
(woodcut of Thoreau by Antonio Frasconi)
Links
WSJ book review: ‘Henry David Thoreau’ Review: The Jester at Walden Pond
Describing how his pristine mornings bring ‘back the heroic ages,’ Thoreau is interrupted by a mocking mosquito.
By Christoph Irmscher on Henry David Thoreau: Thinking Disobediently by Lawrence Buell, ends,
"Mr. Buell’s book powerfully motivates us to treat Thoreau “not as an oracle but as a stimulus to see and be beyond the ordinary.” Regularly satirizing his own forays into secular sainthood, Thoreau came to embrace this world as all the heaven he needed. He could find a whole universe reflected in the evanescent miracle of the snowflake landing on his sleeve during an afternoon walk—a sparkling star dropped right from the sky, its six rays resembling little pine trees, as perfectly formed and beautiful as any of his sentences."
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