Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was an American naturalist, essayist, poet, and philosopher. He is best known for his book Walden and his essay "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience" (originally published as "Resistance to Civil Government"). Thoreau was a lifelong abolitionist, delivering lectures that attacked the fugitive slave law while praising the writings of Wendell Phillips and defending the abolitionist John Brown. Thoreau's philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced the political thoughts and actions of such notable figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. His writings on natural history and philosophy anticipated modern-day environmentalism. Charles Robert Anderson was a professor of American literature at Johns Hopkins University, a noted literary critic, scholar, and the author of critically acclaimed works on Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, and Henry James. He was a trail-blazer in establishing American literature as an independent subject that had its own world-class writers. He died in 1999.
"Every man, I think, reads one book in his life, and this one is mine." -E. B. White"A century and a half after its publication, Walden has become such a totem of the back-to-nature, preservationist, anti-business, civil-disobedience mindset, and Thoreau so vivid a protester, so perfect a crank and hermit saint, that the book risks being as revered and unread as the Bible." -John Updike"In one book...he surpasses everything we have had in America." -Robert Frost
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