Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1817. He graduated from Harvard University in 1837 and worked as a schoolteacher in Concord. Thoreau lived in the home of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a well-known poet and essayist, between 1841 and 1843 and again in 1847. From 1845 to 1847, Thoreau lived in a small shelter he built himself in the woods by Walden Pond near Concord. He devoted himself to the study of nature and to writing, later publishing Walden, or Life in the Woods in 1854. Thoreau’s beliefs led him to take a rather negative view of pre­Civil War America. He hated industrialism because it emphasized material things, and he condemned slavery because it reduced African Americans to the level of property. In his 1849 essay “Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau argued that individuals should passively resist the government whenever it intruded upon their private morality. Henry David Thoreau died in 1862 after a lengthy battle with tuberculosis.
