His years at Harvard were stimulating, if solitary; he immersed himself in a traditional humanities curriculum of multiple languages, anatomy, history, and geography. Upon graduation in 1837, he began teaching in Concord at the Center School, the public school he’d attended as a boy, but left his post after being told to administer corporal punishment to a student. During these years following college Thoreau published his first essay and poem, began lecturing at the Concord Lyceum, and attended Transcendentalist discussions at the home of his mentor, the renowned essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. At Emerson’s urging, Thoreau started a journal—a project that would become his lifelong passion and culminate in more than two million words.

A boat trip with his brother, John, in 1839 set the foundation for his well-known work A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Sadly, unforeseen tragedy separated the tightly knit brothers in 1842, when John died of lockjaw caused by a razor cut. The following year, Thoreau joined Emerson in editing the Transcendental periodical The Dial, a publication to which Thoreau would become a prolific contributor. He also pulled up stakes for a time, accepting a position to tutor Emerson’s children in Staten Island, New York. Half a year later, Thoreau returned to his family’s house in Concord, deeply affected by the abolitionists he had met in Manhattan. He dedicated much of his time to lectures and essays advocating abolition and became involved in sheltering runaway slaves on their journey north.

In 1846 Thoreau was briefly imprisoned for refusing to pay a poll tax to the village of Concord, in protest against the government’s support of slavery, as well as its war of expansion with Mexico. His experience in the Concord jail led to the writing of what would later be titled “Civil Disobedience.” Unappreciated in Thoreau’s lifetime, “Civil Disobedience” is now considered one of the country’s seminal political works. During this period, Thoreau built his cabin on Walden Pond and lived there for a little more than two years. In this small home on Emerson’s property, he began writing his most enduring work, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, and finished the manuscript for A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. When Walden was published in 1854, sales were brisk and its reception favorable, although Thoreau’s work as a whole remained somewhat obscure during his lifetime.

As the years passed, Thoreau’s commitment to the antislavery movement strengthened, as did his popularity as a lecturer and essayist. Even in the declining health of his later years, he remained a man of conviction and action, writing on many subjects and participating in various political causes until shortly before his death from tuberculosis. George Eliot’s review of Walden singles out qualities that attract readers to this day: “a deep poetic sensibility” and “a refined as well as a hardy mind:” Henry David Thoreau died on May 6, 1862, in Concord.

The World of Henry David Thoreau, Walden, and ”Civil Disobedience”

1817Henry David (christened David Henry) Thoreau is born on July 12, in Concord, Massachusetts, to John and Cynthia Thoreau; he is the third of four children.
1818Henry’s family moves to nearby Chelmsford; his father opens a grocery store, which does not prove profitable.
1819Walt Whitman is born on May 31.
1821Financial straits force Henry’s family to move again, this time to Boston, where his father takes a job as a schoolteacher.
1823The Thoreau family returns to Concord, where Henry’s father takes over the family pencil-making business. Henry enters the Concord Center School. Continued financial strain forces his mother to take in boarders.
1827Henry writes his earliest known essay, “The Seasons.” John James Audubon’s The Birds of America is published.
1828Henry and his brother, John, attend Concord Academy, where they study the classics, geography, science, and history. Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language is published.
1829Henry first attends talks at the Concord Lyceum, where he will frequently speak as an adult.
1833Thoreau enters Harvard University, the only child in his family to attend college; he spends many solitary hours studying the classics , numerous languages, history, and the sciences. The Abolition Act of 1833 outlaws slavery in the British Empire.
1835During a semester’s leave of absence from Harvard to teach school in Canton, Massachusetts, Thoreau lives in the home of the Unitarian minister Orestes Brownson, who instructs him in German.
1837Thoreau graduates from Harvard. He begins teaching at the Concord Center School, but resigns after being told to administer corporal punishment to a student. He begins attending Trancendentalist meetings at Ralph Waldo Emerson’s house. At Emerson’s urging he starts a journal, which becomes a lifelong project.
1838Thoreau travels to Maine in search of a teaching job but soon returns to Concord; he and his brother, John, open a private school at the Concord Academy, which they operate until 1841. They find a devoted pupil in the young Louisa May Alcott. Thoreau gives the first of many speeches at the Concord Lyceum.
1839Thoreau and John take a two-week trip on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, in a homemade boat; the journey inspires Thoreau’s later well-known work A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” is published.
1840Ralph Waldo Emerson founds the Transcendentalist periodical The Dial, which serves as the forum for Thoreau’s first published essay and poem. Ellen Sewall rejects the marriage proposals of both Thoreau brothers.
1841Thoreau moves into Emerson’s home, where he works for two years as a groundskeeper and repairman and reads widely from Emerson’s library. He comes up with the idea of living in a cabin on nearby Flint’s Pond. The first series of Emerson’s Essays is published.
1842Thoreau’s brother, John, dies from lockjaw. Shortly after John’s death, Thoreau meets Nathaniel Hawthorne. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Poems on Slavery is published.
1843Thoreau contributes to several publications and coedits The Dial with Emerson. He moves for half a year to Staten Island, where he tutors Emerson’s children. In New York he meets and associates with abolitionists and reformers.
1844Upon his return to Concord, Thoreau becomes more active in the abolition movement, writing essays and speaking out against slavery. The second series of Emerson’s Essays is published.