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Summary
Summary
"Walden. Yesterday I came here to live." That entry from the journal of Henry David Thoreau, and the intellectual journey it began, would by themselves be enough to place Thoreau in the American pantheon. His attempt to "live deliberately" in a small woods at the edge of his hometown of Concord has been a touchstone for individualists and seekers since the publication of Walden in 1854.
But there was much more to Thoreau than his brief experiment in living at Walden Pond. A member of the vibrant intellectual circle centered on his neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson, he was also an ardent naturalist, a manual laborer and inventor, a radical political activist, and more. Many books have taken up various aspects of Thoreau's character and achievements, but, as Laura Dassow Walls writes, "Thoreau has never been captured between covers; he was too quixotic, mischievous, many-sided." Two hundred years after his birth, and two generations after the last full-scale biography, Walls restores Henry David Thoreau to us in all his profound, inspiring complexity.
Walls traces the full arc of Thoreau's life, from his early days in the intellectual hothouse of Concord, when the American experiment still felt fresh and precarious, and "America was a family affair, earned by one generation and about to pass to the next." By the time he died in 1862, at only forty-four years of age, Thoreau had witnessed the transformation of his world from a community of farmers and artisans into a bustling, interconnected commercial nation. What did that portend for the contemplative individual and abundant, wild nature that Thoreau celebrated?
Drawing on Thoreau's copious writings, published and unpublished, Walls presents a Thoreau vigorously alive in all his quirks and contradictions: the young man shattered by the sudden death of his brother; the ambitious Harvard College student; the ecstatic visionary who closed Walden with an account of the regenerative power of the Cosmos. We meet the man whose belief in human freedom and the value of labor made him an uncompromising abolitionist; the solitary walker who found society in nature, but also found his own nature in the society of which he was a deeply interwoven part. And, running through it all, Thoreau the passionate naturalist, who, long before the age of environmentalism, saw tragedy for future generations in the human heedlessness around him.
"The Thoreau I sought was not in any book, so I wrote this one," says Walls. The result is a Thoreau unlike any seen since he walked the streets of Concord, a Thoreau for our time and all time.
Author Notes
Laura Dassow Walls is the William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. She lives in Granger, IN.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this definitive biography, the many facets of Thoreau are captured with grace and scholarly rigor by English professor Walls (The Passage to Cosmos). By convention, she observes, there were "two Thoreaus, both of them hermits, yet radically at odds with each other. One speaks for nature; the other for social justice." Not so here. To reveal the author of Walden as one coherent person is Walls's mission, which she fully achieves; as a result of her vigilant focus Thoreau holds the center-no mean achievement in a work through whose pages move the great figures and cataclysmic events of the period. Emerson, Hawthorne, and Whitman are here; so are Frederick Douglass and John Brown. Details of everyday life lend roundness to this portrait as we follow Thoreau's progress as a writer and also as a reader. Walls attends to the breadth of Thoreau's social and political involvements (notably his concern for Native Americans and Irish-Americans and his committed abolitionism) and the depth of his scientific pursuits. The wonder is that, given her book's richness, Walls still leaves the reader eager to read Thoreau. Her scholarly blockbuster is an awesome achievement, a merger of comprehensiveness in content with pleasure in reading. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A superbly researched and written literary portrait that broadens our understanding of the great American writer and pre-eminent naturalist who has too long been regarded as a self-righteous scold."A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist," wrote Vladimir Nabokov. In Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), this formulation finds its fullest expression, and that's only part of the story. Besides being a great prose stylist and the spiritual father of environmentalism, he was also the author of "Civil Disobedience," which has served as a rallying cry for nonviolent protests ever since. For all that, he's hardly a beloved figure; he's the hermit of Walden Pond, the Concord solipsist sneering at the lesser mortals who lack his independence. In this magnificent new biography, Walls (English/Univ. of Notre Dame; The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America, 2009, etc.) effectively humanizes her subject. The man who will always be regarded by some as the great prig of American literature was deeply involved in 19th-century life. He worked every day, and not just as a relentless writer; he made his living as a handyman, carpenter, expert surveyor, and businessman who helped run his family's pencil-manufacturing company. His friendships, most notably with Ralph Waldo Emerson and others in the transcendentalist movement, were tumultuous but enduring. He was a popular lecturer and an anti-slavery activist. He was also the literary artist who spent nearly a decade trying to describe a year on Walden Pond. The Thoreau on the pages of Walden, writes Walls, "is not the author who so carefully staged the book, but the book's protagonist, who, in the course of the year and a day, is utterly changed by the experience." Thoreau has inspired so many esteemed biographies that it's difficult to claim any new one as definitive. However, Walls delivers a sympathetic and honest portrait that fully captures the private and public life of this singular American figure. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
THE HOME THAT WAS OUR COUNTRY: A Memoir of Syria, by Alia Malek. (Nation Books, $27.99.) This Syrian-Americanjournalist moved to Damascus in 2011 to renovate a family apartment. Her insightful reporting on the war's effects on the population and her account other grandmother's life create a history of Syria. WE CROSSED A BRIDGE AND IT TREMBLED: Voices From Syria, by Wendy Pearlman. (Custom House/HarperCollins, $24.99.) A politics professor collects accounts of refugees in the Middle East and Europe. She foregrounds the extraordinary heroism of ordinary Syrians, both those who are trapped in the country and those who struggle to make new lives. THE CHANGELING, by Victor LaValle. (Spiegel & Grau, $28.) In this modern-day fairy tale, set in New York City, a young father encounters "the old kind" of evil. The anxieties of modern parenting and the rigors of survival in urban America all have their place in this strange and wonderful new novel. HUNGER: A Memoir of (My) Body, by Roxane Gay. (Harper/HarperCollins, $25.99.) Theessayist and novelisttells how she was gangraped at 12 and subsequently gained weight to protect herself. Her memoir is an intellectually rigorous and deeply moving exploration of the ways trauma, stories and desire construct our reality. HENRY DAVID THOREAU: A Life, by Laura Dassow Walls. (University of Chicago, $35.) This new life of Thoreau, in time for his 200th birthday, paints a moving portrait of a brilliant, complex man. One of the book's pleasures is the way it transports us back to America in the first half of the 19 th century. THE ISLAMIC ENLIGHTENMENT. The Struggle Between Faith and Reason: 1798 to Modern Times, by Christopher de Bellaigue. (Liveright, $35.) This fascinating study of Middle Eastern scholars and political figures who grappled with reform and modernization in the 19 th and 20 th centuries reveals the multiplicity of Muslim identities and loyalties. THERE YOUR HEART LIES, by MaryGordon. (Pantheon, $26.95.) The heroine of this exceptional new novel is a 92-year-old widow who defied her wealthy Catholic family to become a nurse during the Spanish Civil War. In the present, the woman forms abond with her granddaughter, who has come to live with her. THE GREAT NADAR: The Man Behind the Camera, by Adam Begley. (Tim Duggan, $28.) This biography of Félix Tournachon, known as Nadar, a 19th-century French photographer who was one of the art's greatest portraitists, is the first to appear in English. QUIET UNTIL THE THAW, by Alexandra Fuller. (Penguin Press, $25.) This ardent and original novel dives deep into Lakota culture and history. Many of the events it describes are rooted in history, and it culminates in the 1973 siege at Wounded Knee. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Choice Review
Those would like to fall in love again with Henry David Thoreau should read this new biography. Walls (Notre Dame) traces Thoreau's career as a writer from his education at Harvard through his major works, concluding with his late work on wild fruits and the Allagash and East Branch. Throughout, Walls draws on Thoreau's journal and correspondence with a variety of noteworthy contemporaries to contextualize and illuminate his published work and his life. Walls also explores Thoreau's commitment to surveying and pencil making--occupations that sometimes competed with and sometimes contributed to his life as a writer. Thoreau's family's lifelong influence on him, his many lively and productive friendships, and his vital role in the Concord community come to life in Walls's account. And Walls documents Thoreau's (and his family's) sustained and active commitment to abolition, the evolution of his attitudes toward Native Americans, and the development of his scientific and ecological thinking. Walls's prose is fluid, conversational, and larded with details that flesh out Henry David Thoreau as a brilliant writer and human being. This volume is a rich introduction to Thoreau for those unfamiliar with him and an almost casually brilliant reintroduction for those who know and love him. Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --Gary Douglas MacDonald, Virginia State University