Henry David Thoreau

Writing on such varied topics as Economy, Reading, Winter Animals, and Solitude, Thoreau spent just over two years in a cabin he built on the edge of Walden Pond on the property of Ralph Waldo Emerson. It was a place for him to find solitude while he wrote, but for his ever-questioning mind it was also an experiment in self-reliance and living close to nature. Thoreau did not assert that others should live the same way, for Walden is the definitive text on Thoreau's own philosophy of life, what he believed in and how he lived it. But many have now come to see the importance of what Thoreau did, and see the significance of his message; that man's spiritual quest to find harmony within himself should also reflect directly on his social, political, and cultural surroundings. In his Biographical Sketch to Thoreau's Excursions (1863) Emerson writes;

He was bred to no profession; he never married; he lived alone; he never went to church; he never voted; he refused to pay a tax to the State: he ate no flesh, he drank no wine, he never knew the use of tobacco; and, though a naturalist, he used neither trap nor gun. He chose, wisely, no doubt, for himself, to be the bachelor of thought and Nature. He had no talent for wealth, and knew how to be poor without the least hint of squalor or inelegance. ....Thoreau was sincerity itself ...