In 1836 Ralph Waldo Emerson, an essayist and lecturer living in Concord, Massachusetts, published a short book called Nature. It told its readers to stop taking their beliefs from older books and to look for themselves: every person, Emerson held, can reach moral and religious truth directly, with no church or tradition in between. The circle that gathered around him that year came to be called the transcendentalists. Henry David Thoreau read Nature in 1837, the year he graduated from Harvard, and among the transcendentalists he is the one who treated the idea as an instruction. If truth is open to anyone who looks, then the way to learn how to live is to test a way of living and keep exact records.
In October 1837, at Emerson's suggestion, Thoreau started a journal. He kept it for twenty-four years, until it ran to some two million words, and most of what he published was first worked out there. That same year he took a post at the Concord public school and resigned within weeks rather than beat the pupils.
The trial that made his name started on 4 July 1845, when he moved into a house he had built on Emerson's land beside Walden Pond. The house measured ten feet by fifteen and cost $28.12½. He stayed until 6 September 1847 and found that about six weeks of paid work a year covered everything he needed. Walden, the book he made of the stay, turns that finding into an argument. The real price of anything is the amount of life a person gives up to get it, and his neighbors, working all year to pay for farms and houses, were paying too much. He told readers not to copy him but to run the same trial on their own lives.
A second trial lasted one night. In July 1846 the Concord tax collector asked him for six years of unpaid poll tax, a flat sum charged per person. Thoreau refused, because the money supported a government that upheld slavery and was at war with Mexico, and he was jailed until someone, probably his aunt, paid the tax for him. The essay that came out of it, now called "Civil Disobedience," makes the claim he is remembered for. When a law requires a person to take part in a wrong done to someone else, that person must break the law and accept the punishment, because a majority vote does not settle what is right. He held to this as the conflict over slavery turned violent: in October 1859 he publicly defended John Brown, the abolitionist who had led an armed raid on a federal arsenal two weeks earlier.
He came to disagree with Emerson. Emerson read nature as a set of symbols pointing to spiritual truths beyond it; Thoreau concluded that the facts needed nothing behind them. In his later years the journal filled with dates and measurements, down to the day each fruit ripened. In September 1860 he explained to a farmers' society in Concord why oaks come up where a pine wood has been cut: squirrels bury the acorns, and no tree grows where no seed has been carried.
Few readers saw any of this while he lived. His first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, was printed in 1849 at his own expense in 1,000 copies. Of these 219 sold and 75 were given away, and in October 1853 the publisher sent 706 back to him; he took up surveying to pay the debt. Walden took five years to sell its 2,000 copies. He died of tuberculosis in 1862, at forty-four. Three years later James Russell Lowell, a poet and Harvard professor, described him in the North American Review as a conceited imitator of Emerson. Wider recognition came after 1906, when a twenty-volume edition printed the journal in full. Gandhi translated part of "Civil Disobedience" for his newspaper in South Africa in 1907, and Martin Luther King Jr. read it as a student in the 1940s. Thoreau still stands outside the usual philosophical canon, though more philosophers now study his account of perception and of the value of land. One of his last manuscripts, on how seeds travel, was first published in 1993.