Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau was born in 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts, into a family of pencil makers whose process he improved. After graduating from Harvard in 1837, he left a teaching post after a few weeks, refusing to inflict corporal punishment, opened a school with his brother that closed when the latter fell ill, and then lived from the family workshop and from surveying. He kept a journal of some two million words. A night in prison in 1846, for an unpaid tax, inspired an essay that Gandhi and Martin Luther King would read. He died in Concord in 1862.

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• NarrativeWaldenHenry David Thoreau · 1854LiteraturePublic domain