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"In wildness is the preservation of the world," wrote Thoreau in his iconic deathbed essay "Walking."Celebrates the bicentennial of Thoreau's birth in 1817.This summation of his life's work, published posthumously in 1862, became a seminal influence in the modern environmental movement and is no less relevant today than 150 years ago. "Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present," he wrote. He extolled walking as a delightful and necessary idleness, an antidote to the burdens of civilization, a means of immersing ourselves in nature and awakening to the moment. "Walking" is recognized by most scholars as Thoreau's "other" masterpiece, Walden in a more concise form. In the introduction of this edition, Adam Tuchinsky accessibly and engagingly unpacks the essay's nineteenth-century associations, highlights the startling modernity of its sentiments, and reveals why Thoreau remains the towering figure in the history of American nature writing.
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Henry David Thoreau (born David Henry Thoreau) was an American author, naturalist, transcendentalist, tax resister, development critic, philosopher, and abolitionist who is best known for , a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay, , an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state. Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry total over 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions were his writings on natural history and philosophy, where he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern day environmentalism. In 1817, Henry David Thoreau was born in Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard University in 1837, taught briefly, then turned to writing and lecturing. Becoming a Transcendentalist and good friend of , Thoreau lived the life of simplicity he advocated in his writings. His two-year experience in a hut in Walden, on land owned by , resulted in the classic, (1854) . During his sojourn there, Thoreau refused to pay a poll tax in protest of slavery and the Mexican war, for which he was jailed overnight. His activist convictions were expressed in the groundbreaking (1849) . In a diary he noted his disapproval of attempts to convert the Algonquins "from their own superstitions to new ones. " In a journal he noted dryly that it is appropriate for a church to be the ugliest building in a village, "because it is the one in which human nature stoops to the lowest and is the most disgraced. " (Cited by in 2000 Years of Disbelief. ) When Parker Pillsbury sought to talk about religion with Thoreau as he was dying from tuberculosis, Thoreau replied: "One world at a time. "Thoreau's philosophy of nonviolent resistance influenced the political thoughts and actions of such later figures as Leo Tolstoy, , and Martin Luther King, Jr. D. 1862. More:
