Walden and Civil Disobedience

Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1817. He graduated from Harvard in 1837, the same year he began his lifelong Journal. Inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau became a key member of the Transcendentalist movement that included Margaret Fuller and Bronson Alcott. The Transcendentalists' faith in nature was tested by Thoreau between 1845 and 1847 when he lived for twenty-six months in a homemade hut at Walden Pond. While living at Walden, Thoreau worked on the two books published during his lifetime: Walden (1854) and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). Several of his other works, including The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, and Excursions, were published posthumously. Thoreau died in Concord, at the age of forty-four, in 1862.

Kristen Case teaches at the University of Maine at Farmington, where she is associate professor of English. She is the author of American Pragmatism and Poetic Practice: Crosscurrents from Emerson  to Susan Howe (Camden  House, 2011) and Little Arias, a collection  of poems (New Issues Press, 2015). She is coeditor of Thoreau at 200: Essays and Reassessments (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and has published articles on Thoreau, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and  William James. She lives inTemple, Maine.