How long did thoreau stay at walden pond

Why has every man a conscience, then? We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and Titanic features, the sea-coast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.

To the philosopher all sects, all nations, are alike. There is an old joke among Thoreauvians that most people know Thoreau as the man who spent half his life at Walden Pond and the other half in jail, but the reason that his brief time at Walden and his one night in jail have become such defining moments in his life can be summed up under one term: Writer.

Thoreau was one of the most powerful and influential writers America has produced. His prose style was unequaled. On July 4, , Henry David Thoreau decided it was time to be alone. He settled in a forest on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and built himself a tiny cabin.

This work—along with Civil Disobedience, also inspired by his time at the pond—would go on to become one of the most influential writings in American history, sparking political movements from abolitionism to environmentalism to civil rights. After two years, two months, and two days in relative solitude, Thoreau left his post on this day in But he was discovered to be gifted at an early age, and his parents scraped together enough money to send him to private schools, including Harvard, where he read voraciously and excelled academically.

A Week sold poorly, leading Thoreau to hold off publication of Walden , so that he could revise it extensively to avoid the problems, such as looseness of structure and a preaching tone unalleviated by humor, that had put readers off in the first book.

Walden was a modest success: it brought Thoreau good reviews, satisfactory sales, and a small following of fans. Thoreau returned to the Emerson home and lived there for two years, while Emerson was on a lecture tour in Europe.

For much of his remaining years, he rented a room in his parents' home. He made his living by working in the pencil factory, by doing surveying, by lecturing occasionally, and by publishing essays in newspapers and journals.

His income, however, was always very modest, and his main concerns were his daily afternoon walks in the Concord woods, the keeping of a private journal of his nature observations and ideas, and the writing and revision of essays for publication.

Thoreau was an ardent and outspoken abolitionist, serving as a conductor on the underground railroad to help escaped slaves make their way to Canada. His trips to the Maine woods and to Cape Cod provided material for travel essays published first in journals; these were eventually collected into posthumous books. Other excursions took him to Canada and, near the end of his life, to Minnesota. In May , Thoreau died of the tuberculosis with which he had been periodically plagued since his college years.

He left behind large unfinished projects, including a comprehensive record of natural phenomena around Concord, extensive notes on American Indians, and many volumes of his daily journal jottings. Since his death in , Thoreau and his work have inspired a steady stream of books, essays, paintings, and other works.

The biographies we most often recommend are:. Richardson, Jr. University of California Press, For many, Walden has served as a touchstone. In the years following Thoreau's death in , his sister and his friends undertook the responsibility of editing his work. Thoreau's life and work have continued to provoke and inspire, and there are almost as many different opinions as there are readers. Which view of Thoreau is most accurate: The dour hermit of Walden Woods?

The environmental guru? The antislavery crusader? The irresponsible layabout? The pacifist? The pantheist? The prophet? None suffices to represent Thoreau by itself; all find support in Walden. The site he picked was on land belonging to his close friend Ralph Waldo Emerson; he and Emerson had already discussed Thoreau's plan to live on the land which Emerson had recently purchased. By July 4 of that same year, the house was substantially complete and Thoreau moved to the pond.

The experiment had begun. I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Walden , He also went to the pond to work on a book that was to be a memorial tribute to his older brother John, who had died three years earlier of lockjaw. The narrative frame of the story is provided by a boat trip the brothers had taken in , but there are many philosophical digressions.

At Walden, Thoreau worked diligently on A Week , but he also explored Walden Woods and recorded his observations on nature in his Journal.