The Indispensable Thoreau (July/August 1988 | Volume: 39, Issue: 5)

The Indispensable Thoreau

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Authors: Edward Hoagland

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July/August 1988 | Volume 39, Issue 5

thoreau
Thoreau, though far from being the first “nature writer,” has come to stand for the whole genre.

Henry David Thoreau, who never earned much of a living or sustained a relationship with any woman that wasn’t brotherly—who lived mostly under his parents’ roof (and is buried simply as “Henry” in his father’s graveyard plot), who advocated one day’s work and six days “off” as the weekly round and was considered a bit of a fool in his hometown, sometimes even having to endure the nickname “Dolittle”—is probably the American writer who tells us best how to live comfortably with our most constant companion, ourselves. We find ourselves brought to life in Thoreau’s books if we too want to simplify our roster of obligations and clutter of habits and possessions, to be independent of wage-slave constrictions and social obiter dicta, and if we know that common sense and honesty do not always coincide with prevailing tastes and majority opinion. His masterpiece, Walden, is controversial because it goes against the grain of go-getterism, conventional social arrangements, and established religion. But when he went traveling, he became a more convivial man of letters, and particularly in the Maine woods, “far from mankind and election day,” he discovered so little to displease him that there’s no hint of churlishness or reclusiveness in his buoyant account, even on the eve of the Civil War, whose roiling approach profoundly disturbed him.

Born in 1817, Thoreau died of tuberculosis in 1862, in his mid-forties, having kept a voluminous journal from the age of twenty but having published only a smattering of magazine articles and poems and two books, the first of them at his own expense. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers appeared in 1849 and sold only 219 copies in four years. Its failure commercially delayed for five years the scheduled appearance of Walden (1854), which then took five years to sell out a printing of 2,000 copies, priced at a dollar apiece. His fame—and two more marvelous books, The Maine Woods (1864) and Cape Cod (1865), edited by his sister Sophia and his friend Ellery Channing from manuscript versions and magazine pieces—was posthumous. Nevertheless, it’s easy to exaggerate Thoreau’s obscurity at the time of his death, which in no way equaled Herman Melville’s parched solitude, for instance, in the four decades after Moby Dick came out in 1851. These two great American Romantics were almost exact contemporaries, like their masterpieces, and neither’s achievement was recognized for the better part of a century. But Thoreau had had the good luck to be born in Concord, Massachusetts, where he was thrown into contact with many of the literary figures of the day, notably Ralph Waldo Emerson, who became his mentor and champion, Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Russell Lowell, and Orestes Brownson, and on a wider scene