Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau was a Concord schoolteacher, surveyor and pencil-maker who lived in Emerson’s house, then for two years in a cabin he built at Walden Pond, and spent a night in jail for refusing to pay a tax that supported slavery. Walden is the account of the experiment; Civil Disobedience the lecture that came out of the jail and later reached Gandhi and King; Walking the essay that gave the conservation movement its motto. He kept a journal of two million words, died of tuberculosis at forty-four, and was largely unread until the twentieth century found it needed him.