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Thoreau’s iconic memoir about life in the outdoors, Walden, exaggerates his solitude. His mother visited him regularly at his cabin, which was only a 20-minute walk from his family home in Concord. Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience” inspired Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi.
Henry David Thoreau has iconic status among introverts, conservationists, and transcendentalists, but the essayist who wrote a beloved memoir about life in the outdoors in the 1840s also knew a thing or two about exaggeration.
At Walden; or, Life in the Woods, Thoreau writes of divorcing society for two years, boasting that “I love being alone. I have never found the companion who was so sociable as solitude.”
Though Thoreau talks about how he regularly had visitors at his Massachusetts cabin, he’s not particularly forthright about the fact that his mother visited him every few weeks, bringing him food and the clothes she washed for him.
Thoreau had built his cabin on the banks of Walden Pond, on land belonging to his friend and fellow writer Ralph Waldo Emerson. It was only a 20-minute walk from Thoreau’s family home in Concord and sat in an area popular with swimmers in the summer and ice skaters in the winter. So while Thoreau espoused self-reliance and life in nature and gave the world what is now considered a classic text on individualism, he kept civilization close at hand.
Read more about Henry David Thoreau:
A year before his Walden adventure, Thoreau accidentally set fire to hundreds of acres of woods near Concord, Massachusetts.
Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience” inspired many future leaders to stand up to injustice, including Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi.
Thoreau was an early proponent of vegetarianism, arguing that people who ate animals lost more energy than they gained from meat.
