Outline of Henry David Thoreau A Life by Laura Dassow Walls

Why Thoreau?

• Thoreau thus saw the end of one geological epoch and the beginning of the next

Chronology

• Birth
  • Born: July 12, 1817
  • 1816, “Year without a Summer”
  • 1815, Indonesia’s Mount Tambora erupted, the largest volcanic event in over 1,300 years
  • on July 12, 1817, Cynthia gave birth to a healthy baby boy. They called him Henry, but then, only six weeks later, John’s little brother David died, just after coming of age at twenty-one. So on October 12, when it came time to bring their infant son to the First Parish Church for baptism, they followed family custom and kept the name alive: the Reverend Ezra Ripley baptized their second son David Henry Thoreau.
• Childhood
  • His family kept transferring from one house to another.
  • It was a barefoot, knockabout childhood—rough, unfussy, and close to the soil, with animals everywhere.
  • Even as a child, his spirit longed for “that sweet solitude,”
  • His mother told a friend how, when Henry and John still slept together in a trundle bed, “John would go to sleep at once, but Henry often lay long awake. His mother found the little boy lying so one night, long after he had gone upstairs, and said, ‘Why, Henry dear, why don’t you go to sleep?’ ‘Mother’ said he, ‘I have been looking through the stars to see if I couldn’t see God behind them.’”
• Harvard
  • in a mere four hours “a young man of any capacity at all” could easily accomplish the day’s tasks, leaving him lots of time to pursue his own bent “unimpeded.”
    • For Thoreau this meant walking off into the countryside to observe birds or hunt for nests and eggs.
    • It also meant daily trips to Harvard’s tremendous library, the best in the nation.
  • LANGUAGES: Thoreau went on to make languages his special project.
    • By the time he graduated, Thoreau could read at least five foreign languages—Latin, Greek, Italian, French, and German—plus a little Spanish and Portuguese. On his own he studied Wampanoag, the Native American language of eastern Massachusetts
  • MATHEMATICS: Thoreau’s flair for mathematics might have put him in the advanced study group who met at Peirce’s home in the evenings.
  • SCIENCE: The man who truly introduced Thoreau to science was not a professor at all, but the college’s shy and modest librarian, beloved by generations of students: Thaddeus William Harris.
    • In May 1837, he joined forces with Thoreau and friends to found Harvard’s Natural History Society, leading them on field excursions around Cambridge in pursuit of plants, birds, and insects.
  • PHILOSOPHY: By the time he graduated, Thoreau was saturated with Harvard rationalism at its finest, even as outside the classroom he was finding his way to the very writers and intellectuals who were about to topple it all.
  • Harvard “nearly ruined him as a writer.”
    • Every term for three long years, Edward Tyrrel Channing, the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, issued Thoreau a long series of assignments, every one of which he collected, corrected, and returned, scored on Quincy’s merciless eight-point scale. If Thoreau kept a journal through these years, it is lost; if he wrote letters home, they are gone; when he ventured into poetry, his verses mostly vanished.42 What survives are his essays for Channing. They disappoint.
    • The young and earnest Henry Thoreau learned so well how to write for his teacher that it took ten years and a move to Walden Pond to shake himself free.
  • How Thoreau broke the spell of Harvard and started his life as a philosopher
    • Brownson
      • This was Thoreau’s first encounter with a free-range intellectual for whom ideas snapped and crackled, who moved easily in the circles of the great and the near great. His term with Brownson broke the spell of Harvard.
      • To Thoreau, the scholarship boy struggling to pay his tuition bills, Brownson’s words hit home. To Brownson, education was the key to creating true equality, which meant the key to remedying all the evils of society. He didn’t mean reading, writing, and ciphering; he meant real education, “the formation of character, the moral, religious, intellectual, and physical training, disciplining, of our whole community.”
      • Thoreau was living with Brownson at the very moment he was writing his breakthrough book, New Views of Society, Christianity, and the Church, which soon joined Emerson’s Nature as a founding text of Transcendentalism.
      • Thoreau was testing out Transcendentalism on his own well before it existed as a movement.
  • Six weeks with Wheeler at a cabin in Flint’s Pond one summer
    • One could say that Henry Thoreau made a similar vow. His experiment at Walden Pond had its origin here, in these weeks spent living and writing with Charles Stearns Wheeler.
• After Harvard: Public School Teacher
  • Feeling rootless and cut off from the person he had been, Thoreau was confessing anxiety over his new identity as a Harvard graduate and a young man of promise. It was around this time that he changed his name, reversing the baptismal “David Henry” to his preferred “Henry David.”
  • teacher of Concord’s Center Grammar School
    • Thoreau made clear when he was hired that he would not flog his students for disobedience, but “talk morals as a punishment instead.”
    • That evening, having completed his act of “uncivil obedience,” Thoreau went before Deacon Ball and resigned. Next day he returned to tell his students that punishing with force went against his conscience: “He wouldn’t keep school any longer, if that was the way he had to do it.”
    • Thus ten days after it began, Thoreau’s career as a public schoolteacher was over.
• Transcendental Apprentice
  • Journal
    • Thoreau carefully commemorated Sunday, October 22, 1837, as nothing less than his second Lebenstag, the day that gave him birth as a writer.
    • “‘What are you doing now?’ he asked, ‘Do you keep a journal?’—So I make my first entry today.”
    • Emerson from “Human Culture”
      • solitude and journal-keeping work together: solitude is not for empty reverie but for the productive habit of exploring, pen in hand
      • Thoreau’s response to that call inaugurated a monumental life’s work, an epic journey of over two million words, sustained as long as he could hold a pen.
  • Solitude
    • the budding writer hungered for solitude. Henry took a room in the attic—what he called his “upper empire,” from whose “perspective window” he could look out on the sunrise and see “all things … in their true relations.”
      • There in that upper empire he wrote up his first lecture for the Concord Lyceum, on April 11, 1838, on “Society.”
  • Making a living
    • Pencil factory
    • The Thoreau School
      • In mid-June, 1838, Henry Thoreau opened a school of his own, right in the Parkman House.
      • Teaching philosophy
        • education should be a pleasure both for teacher and student, and discipline should be the same in the classroom as in the street; that is, not the cowhide whip but life itself.
        • To transmit that spark, the teacher should be a student, too, learning with and from his pupils. But such teaching “supposes a degree of freedom which rarely exists”—the freedom to liberate the self.

(What details about Thoreau’s background are relevant in informing his creativity?)

References

Walls, L. D. (2017). Henry David Thoreau: A Life (First edition). University of Chicago Press.