Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was born in Concord, Massachusetts, graduated from Harvard, and spent his life in his native town as schoolteacher, surveyor, pencil maker, and friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson. From 1845 to 1847 he lived alone in a cabin he built on Emerson's land at Walden Pond, and the book he made of the experience, Walden, published in 1854, is one of the central works of American literature. His essay on civil disobedience, written after a night in jail for refusing to pay a tax, influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King. He died of tuberculosis at forty-four, leaving a journal of two million words.