A Plea for Captain John Brown Read to the citizens of Concord, Massachusetts on Sunday evening, October thirtieth, eighteen fifty-nine

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was born in Concord, Massachusetts, studied at Harvard and worked in his family's pencil business, as a surveyor and as a handyman in Emerson's house. From 1845 to 1847 he lived alone in a cabin by Walden Pond, the experience behind Walden.

In 1846 he spent a night in jail for refusing to pay a tax that supported slavery and the war with Mexico, and his essay Civil Disobedience, born from that night, inspired Gandhi and Martin Luther King. He died of tuberculosis at forty-four, leaving journals that fill thousands of pages of observations of nature.