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In 1839, Henry David Thoreau and his brother John spent two weeks travelling by boat on the Concord and Merrimack rivers in Massachusetts and New Hampshire…
In 1839, Henry David Thoreau and his brother John spent two weeks travelling by boat on the Concord and Merrimack rivers in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Thoreau shapes the journey into a book of seven days, one for each day of the week, mixing scenes of the rivers, the fish and the farms along the banks with long reflections on friendship, religion, poetry, history and the Hindu scriptures.
Context and significance
John died of tetanus in 1842, and the book, published in 1849, is partly a memorial to him. It sold so badly that the publisher returned the unsold copies, and Thoreau joked that he owned a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which he had written himself. Read Walden and Walton's The Compleat Angler.
About the author
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.