Responding to a ten-year anniversary questionnaire from his Harvard class in 1847, he declared, “I am a Schoolmaster—a private Tutor, a Surveyor—a Gardener, a Farmer—a Painter, I mean a House Painter, a Carpenter, a Mason, a Day-Laborer, a Pencil-Maker, a Glass-paper Maker, a Writer, and sometimes a Poetaster” (Thoreau, pp. 650—651 ). Thoreau was indeed, at different times, all of these things. The family business was pencil-making, and Henry periodically threw himself into it with gusto, developing new techniques for improving the quality of the graphite that allowed the business, eventually, to shift from pencil-making to a more lucrative process for producing graphite to sell to other pencil manufacturers. Throughout the 1850s, he also relied increasingly on his skill as a surveyor to pay his—and his family’s —bills, including the notorious $300 debt for the publication costs of A Week. His arrangement for staying as the Emersons’ long-term houseguest included working at a number of odd jobs around the house and property. And on top of all of this activity, there was, of course, always the writing.

By the time Thoreau took possession of the unsold copies of A Week, Emerson was already a household name, both in the United States and abroad. Indeed, Emerson had gone to lecture in England and France in 1847 on the basis of his established reputation. As if occupying the shadow of that reputation were not enough, Thoreau had to contend as well with the substance of Emerson’s teaching, which was not kind to derivative success. Emerson, after all, was the apostle of self-reliance, and as such took a rather dim view of disciples. “Genius is always sufficiently the enemy of genius by over influence,” Emerson had said in “The American Scholar” (Emerson, p. 58). And, “I had better never see a book, than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system” (p. 57). In the Divinity School “Address,” he had insisted, “Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or wholly reject; and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing” (p. 79). Emerson revolutionized American literary culture by infusing into it this spirit of radical independence and originality.

Although this attitude of independence and originality was itself in some measure shaped by British and European Romantic influences, Emerson linked it to Americans’ sense of doing something radically new in the world; he cast self-reliance as an antidote to American cultural belatedness—the sense that for all its political independence and innovation, America remained a cultural backwater, dependent on Europe for its cultural standards and models. Emerson turned this condition on its head, declaring in the opening paragraph of “The American Scholar,” “Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close” (Emerson, p. 53). For the first time, a sense of a distinctively American cultural mission took center stage. Americans were urged to cultivate freely their native creative powers, unburdened by the weight of cultural traditions. They would no longer achieve cultural recognition by importing and imitating acknowledged English and continental models, but would discover and promulgate their own unique cultural genius. The hallmark of this genius, according to Emerson, would be Americans’ heightened sense of self-reliance. Striking a note to which a young Henry David Thoreau clearly vibrated from head to toe, Emerson announced in “The American Scholar,” “Not out of those, on whom systems of education have exhausted their culture, comes the helpful giant to destroy the old or to build the new, but out of unhandselled savage nature, out of terrible Druids and Berserkirs, come at last Alfred and Shakespeare” (Emerson, p. 62).

Undoubtedly, Emerson overstates the radical independence of individuals, although he does so with an often acutely ironic sense of just how embedded even the most self-reliant individual is in the larger machinery of social and historical networks. He also exaggerates the rawness of the socio-cultural environment that nurtures and sustains such native genius. But such characteristic exaggeration nevertheless gave Americans a new sense of cultural vitality and authority. Thoreau’s writings, including the work written initially for public presentation on the lecture circuit, exude this spirit of bold and original creation.

Still, as buoyed as Thoreau must have been by his close contact with Emerson and others associated with this new American literature, he must have wondered where he himself fit in the larger scheme. His difficulties seeing A Week into print combined with the volume’s mixed reviews and 706 remaindered copies stored in his attic; the seeming indifference with which some of his lectures and magazine publications were being received, including parts of what would become Walden; the constant need for money; the sense of occupying Emerson’s long and much-admired shadow; and, over time, the added weight of increasingly strained relations with Emerson all must have contributed to some doubt, on Thoreau’s part, that he ever would amount to anything more than an exceptionally well-read jack-of-all-trades. Add to all of this the tragedy of losing his brother to lockjaw in 1842 and other personal disappointments, such as the rejection of his marriage proposal by Ellen Sewall—perhaps the only serious love of his life (with the possible exception of the eminently unmarriageable Lydian Emerson, Emerson’s wife).

Everybody who cared about him wondered what would become of so peculiarly gifted a man as Henry Thoreau.