Henry David Thoreau: A Study of His Work and Writing Advice

Introduction

Henry David Thoreau, a writer, philosopher, essayist, poet, environmentalist, and pencil maker, was born in 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts. As one of the most influential American writers to ever exist, it may come as a surprise to learn he only published two novels before his passing at the age of 44 in 1862. While there are other works of his published during his life and posthumously, none are talked about as much as Walden, originally published in 1854.

Thoreau was an intelligent young man and excelled in school but was unimpressed by the prestige of it all and preferred to spend his time suiting the school’s resources to his own interests. This was a common theme in Thoreau’s life. He had no issue finding things to be of his interest, but when discipline and structure were required, he often pulled back and switched directions. His life would be filled with constant change and upheavals.

He became a teacher at a grammar school, even started his own school with his brother John in 1838, but each of these endeavors only lasted a short amount of time. His longest and most sustainable idea bloomed from a two-year, two-month, and two-day stint at Walden Pond, located just under two miles from Thoreau’s hometown, Concord, MA.

In his own words, Thoreau went to Walden Pond to live a simpler life. It was an experiment to see if he could readjust his thoughts and lifestyle into more self-reliable manners. After looking at some other aspects of his life and upsetting events that occurred around this time, Thoreau may have also gone to Walden Pond to get away from life’s tragedies. A cut off engagement to one of the first American female physicians, Ellen Sewall, in 1840, and the death of his beloved brother, John, in 1842 both could have factored into Thoreau’s reasons for wanting to leave the city to live a “deliberate” life.

Thoreau was not an extremist. The preconceived notion that he went to be a hermit in the woods for years with no interactions with anyone would suggest this, but he was actually quite the opposite. It’s a popular misconception that Thoreau’s stay was isolated and lonely. Walden Pond is only two miles from town and there were other people who lived around Walden Pond among nature’s company—often slaves and poor people that had been shoved to the outer fringes of society. His frequent trips to and from town and dinners with family and friends suggest that Thoreau was incredibly social and even after his stay in the woods Thoreau returned to the busy and bustling streets of town. This by all means does not indicate that Thoreau was deceitful or that he didn’t accomplish what he set out to do. His goal was not to completely cut off society nor become a lonesome man in the woods. His goal was to adjust his perspectives of what life, and therefore nature, could offer him if he began to understand his relation and role within nature.

Significance of Walden

On any given page of Walden, there will be a myriad of different ideas of Thoreau’s that leap off the page and throw themselves at you. And whether you find them aggregable or not was not of concern to Thoreau. In only the beginning of Walden, he says, “It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live, for my sight has been whetted by experience.” Thoreau, having grown tired of the hustle and bustle of city life, did what any average 27-year-old would do. He moved onto his good friend Ralph Waldo Emerson’s property and built his own cabin out of leftover lumber. The total cost was $28 USD. He began to cultivate his own bean and vegetable crops on Emerson’s land and spent many of his hours walking, writing, and observing the nature around him.

A popular theme found amongst the pages of Walden is living your truth and seeing the world for what it really is, what it really has to offer. Thoreau came to firmly believe growing a connection and an understanding of Nature would lead to becoming grounded and comfortable with life. He saw a relationship between humans and nature that is all about balance and contemplation.

Thoreau was disciplined in that he wanted to see results from his “experimental” way of living. He walked, read, spoke, wrote, lived, and took action according to a set of very specific standards he held himself to. He valued spirituality—progress, thought, and self-reliance of an individual—and sought to discover as much of it as he could among the nature that Walden Pond offered. He was concerned with interacting with the physical world as a sentient being and the spirituality that could be found within this. Thoreau had no interest in overanalyzing symbolism that may or may not be present in nature. All things in nature have a purpose and there is always something to be observed and learned from.

Thoreau is very specific that all natural objects have a purpose. He had a distaste for clutter and unnecessary objects that often served no real purpose. Too much clutter leads to thinking that useless objects are actually essential when they only take up space in both reality and our thoughts. He says, “Our life it frittered away by detail… Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.”

An idea perhaps more relevant today that it was in the 19th century is Thoreau’s opinion that overconsumption is the enemy. He witnessed what consumerism would have been then and knew that it was taking up too much space in his mind. His decision to live with only what he needed for the next couple of years was a direct result of this. He thought consumerism leads to a lack of freedom in choices and opinions, and an increase in desire and mistakes. It was all about simplifying in order to see what was truly essential—everything else just gets in the way.

Other Notable Works

In 1846, Thoreau—for the sixth time—refused to pay his state poll tax as a protest to the American government which promoted “the institution of slavery, the extermination of Native Americans, and the war against Mexico.” This protest led to his famous one night stint in jail after a family member conceded and paid the tax for him—which, or course, Thoreau was not particularly elated about. This encounter led to the writing of his 1849 essay, then titled “Resistance to Civil Government,” and now known as “Civil Disobedience.” In this essay, Thoreau discusses the idea of justice and the government’s responsibility to have respect for an individual under its protection. He says, “There will never be a really free and enlightened State, until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived and treats him accordingly. I please myself with imagining a State as last which can afford to be just to all men.”

Sometimes it seems that Thoreau struggled with his own philosophies. A well-known abolitionist, Thoreau often wondered how nature could be so wonderous and mankind could be so ignoble. He was conflicted about his own way of living and the complicities everyone had when so many slaves were suffering—in both the North and South. Thoreau even extended these ideologies into the natural world. He wrote that all living things are in possession of souls and humans have no right or responsibility to destroy anything that is naturally occurring.

Written alongside Walden at Walden Pond, Thoreau also put together an account of his trip with his brother, John, to the White Mountains of New Hampshire in 1839. With his own money in 1849, Thoreau published A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. The publishing of this work not only puzzled his contemporaries—for it critiqued Christian institutions and had an unusual structure for the time—but it also sent him into debt. Although more understood and cherished today, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers is where Thoreau first included his ideas about nature and man and living a simple life. He discussed his understandings of why Native Americans lived the way they did and his great distaste for the Industrial Revolution.

Writing Advice

Henry David Thoreau’s writing advice is to write often. He says that writers should write about as many things as they possibly can. Get a million thoughts on the page and then go from there. In his journal, he states writers shouldn’t focus too much on little ideas or write for too long, otherwise a writer risks getting caught up in his own mind and “too much possessed by his thought.” And from here is where a writer can “increase” his “stock of knowledge” of the subjects they have written about. Thoreau wants writers to write about new things, and in turn gain new experiences. He wants them to first seek out new ideas and then write.

It’s Thoreau’s opinion that writing about what you already know limits a writer. Since we have the capability to make new memories and collect new ideas and knowledge, we should be doing just that. This makes sense when taking into consideration the reasoning for Thoreau moving to Walden Pond. His yearning to learn the bare necessities of life led him to start documenting and compiling his most important and influential works.

Every day, Thoreau walked outside around Walden Pond. These walks would often be hours long and an opportunity for self-reflection. It was during these times that Thoreau would gather ideas for his writing and parts of his philosophy. And later, sitting in the doorway of his cabin or watching through a window, Thoreau would write in his journal about nature and the ideas that presented himself earlier in the day. These observations would later be compiled in a draft of Walden, or at the time known as Life in the Woods. This kind of knowledge was something that would have been unattainable had Thoreau stayed in the noisy city of Concord. And it was his belief that humans needed an allotted amount of time outside each day to retain happiness and satisfaction—something that is still believed today and recommended by many healthcare professionals (which can be read here, here, and here).

Thoreau expects people to be “susceptible” to “influences important to our intellectual and moral growth, if the sun had shone and the wind blown on us a little less; and no doubt it is a nice matter to proportion rightly the thick and thin skin.”

To think of Henry David Thoreau inserted into today’s society is a little horrifying. He would absolutely detest much of the technology we are so dependent on and if given the chance, would probably choose to never leave the haven of Walden Pond if given the option to stay there or in today’s much busier, noisier, and neverending network of electronics and distractions. It’s hard to know whether or not Thoreau ever imagined what life would be life in a couple hundred years. Would he have expected that our climate had changed this much? Maybe an inkling of change. Even then he was attentive to humans’ greed and warned that greed would lead to terrible things. But it’s unlikely that he could foresee the mass amount of change and damage we’ve done thus far.

It’s also unlikely that Thoreau foresaw his works having the success and influence they have in the 21st century. It took years for the later revised version of Walden to sell the first 2,000 copies, and yet as of today, there have been millions of copies sold and translated into dozens of languages. The world Thoreau witnessed around him during his life is very different to the one we live in today. It would be unrecognizable to him, but many of the ideas present in his publications, like Walden and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, are just as relevant today as they were in 1854.