EVEN AFTER 200 years, Henry David Thoreau continues to be a controversial (and, to some, annoying) figure. In a 2015 New Yorker article titled “Pond Scum,” Kathryn Schulz eviscerates the 19th century author of Walden, describing him as “self-obsessed: narcissistic, fanatical about self control.”
Schulz is not alone in her criticism. In Thoreau’s own beloved village of Concord, Mass., he was attacked for being a hypocrite because he would slip away from his hand-built cabin in the woods to enjoy hot meals and drop off his laundry at the family home. This after he had brazenly declared himself self-sufficient. To make matters worse, he thundered against alcohol, gluttony, and sex in Walden, just as many were happily putting Puritanism behind them.
Yet Thoreau not only endures but is thriving in today’s 21st century zeitgeist. He has “come down to us in ice, chilled into a misanthrope prickly with spines,” declares Laura Dassow Walls, author of a recently released biography, Henry David Thoreau: A Life.
Walls writes of Thoreau set in a New England deep in the throes of change. Ever mindful of the worrisome new global economy, Thoreau sought out and wrote about those being left out and struggling. His subjects included Native Americans, Irish immigrants, and ex-slaves, who were living precarious lives along Walden Pond. Perhaps his interest stemmed from the fact that, for years, Thoreau’s own extended family lived a life of penury, according to Walls, before the small pencil factory they ran in their backyard prospered, making them comfortable during Thoreau’s adult years.
On graduating from Harvard during the panic of 1837, Thoreau’s prospects dimmed. He quickly resigned from a promising teaching job because his conscience was so troubled after he reluctantly administered corporal punishment to students. To support himself, he often worked as the town handyman. Eventually, he developed his talents as a surveyor, civil engineer, naturalist, lecturer, and author, though this took many years.
Thoreau’s most complicated relationship was with his longtime mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who alternately praised and emotionally lacerated the younger writer at particularly vulnerable times during Thoreau’s seesaw career. Thoreau “had come of age among a circle of radical intellectuals called ‘Transcendentalists,”’ which had Emerson as their leader.
It was Thoreau’s mother, Cynthia, and his two sisters, Helen and Sophia, spearheading the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society, that made him a ferocious supporter of the Underground Railroad. Upon returning to live in the family homestead, he joined his family in helping slaves escape to Canada. One cannot emphasize enough the deep horror Thoreau experienced when a runaway slave, Anthony Burns, “was marched in chains to the [Boston] harbor … guarded by police with guns drawn, armed federal marshals, an artillery regiment, and three platoons of marines.” These events would propel him “into the most militant ranks of radical abolitionists.” In his famed essay “Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau wrote that he could not support a government that “enslaves men, shoots Mexicans, and robs Indians.”
In an affectionate introduction to a bicentennial edition of Walden, environmentalist Bill McKibben wrote that Thoreau “was the American avatar in a long line that stretches back at least to Buddha, the line that runs straight through Jesus and St. Francis and a hundred other cranks and gurus.”
Walls’ vastly knowledgeable, emotionally generous, and novelistic book describes an endlessly curious, path-breaking New Englander who, until his death of tuberculosis at the age of 44, lived surrounded by a network of mostly affectionate friends and family, not as the loner he is often depicted to have been.
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