David Henry Thoreau Bio/Wiki, Net Worth, Married 2018
Henry David Thoreau (/???ro?, ???ro?, ??o?ro?/; July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) was an American author, poet, philosopher, polymath, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist. He is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay Resistance to Civil Government (also known as Civil Disobedience), an argument for disobedience to an unjust state.Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry total over 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions are 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. His literary style interweaves close natural observation, personal experience, pointed rhetoric, symbolic meanings, and historical lore, while displaying a poetic sensibility, philosophical austerity, and "Yankee" love of practical detail. He was also deeply interested in the idea of survival in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay; at the same time he advocated abandoning waste and illusion in order to discover life's true essential needs.He was a lifelong abolitionist, delivering lectures that attacked the Fugitive Slave Law while praising the writings of Wendell Phillips and defending abolitionist John Brown. Thoreau's philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced the political thoughts and actions of such notable figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr.Thoreau is sometimes cited as an anarchist. Though Civil Disobedience seems to call for improving rather than abolishing government — "I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government" — the direction of this improvement points toward 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." Richard Drinnon partly blames Thoreau for the ambiguity, noting that Thoreau's "sly satire, his liking for wide margins for his writing, and his fondness for paradox provided ammunition for widely divergent interpretations of 'Civil Disobedience.'"
Leiden University, Harvard Law School, Concord Academy, Eton College, Harvard College, Harvard University
Parents
John Thoreau, Henry James Sr., Mary Robertson Walsh, Sarah Gould Fielding, Cynthia Dunbar, Edmund Fielding
Siblings
William James, Sarah Fielding, John Fielding, Alice James, Garth Wilkinson James, John Thoreau Jr., Sophia Thoreau, Helen Thoreau, Robertson James
Nominations
Nobel Prize in Literature, Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, USC Scripter Award
Movies
The Innocents, The Heiress, The Portrait of a Lady, Tom Jones, What Maisie Knew, The Nightcomers, The Wings of the Dove, Presence of Mind, The Others, The Bostonians, The Golden Bowl, Washington Square, Daisy Miller, The Lost Moment, The Turn of the Screw, Through the Shadow, Celine and Julie Go Boa...
Star Sign
Cancer
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Quote
1
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
2
Any fool can make a rule and every fool will mind it.
3
Things do not change; we change.
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Fact
1
Nonfiction book: "Wild Fruits", written 1860, published 1999.
2
Nonfiction book: "Walden", 1854.
3
He and his family were part of the Underground Railroad, the network which aided fugitive slaves on their way north to freedom.
4
One of the leading personalities in New England Transcendentalism, his "Civil Disobedience" (1849) influenced Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King
5
Surname pronounced Ther-ROW. He reversed the order of his first two names after graduating from Harvard in 1837.
6
Sold the famous house on Walden Pond he built for himself to Ralph Waldo Emerson.
$900,000
