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The Moral Individualism of Henry David Thoreau

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

David L. Norton
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Extract

Henry Thoreau boasted that he was widely travelled in Concord, Massachusetts. He was born there on 12 July 1817, and he died there on 6 May 1862, of tuberculosis, at the age of forty-four years. In 1837 he graduated from Harvard College, and in 1838 he joined Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and others in the informal group that became known as the New England Transcendentalists. The author of four books, many essays and poems, and a voluminous journal, he is best known for the book Walden and the essay ‘Civil Disobedience’, and for the circumstances attending these two milestones in American thought and literature.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 19: American Philosophy , March 1985 , pp. 239 - 253
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1985

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References

1 Thoreau, Henry D., ‘Economy’, Walden, Shanley, J. Lyndon (ed.) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 14–15.Google Scholar

2 The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, ‘Walden, ’ edition (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1906), IV, 374–375.Google Scholar

3 Walden, ‘Conclusion’, 329.Google Scholar

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5 Thoreau, Henry D., ‘Resistance to Civil Government’, in Reform Papers, Glick, Wendell (ed.) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 89Google Scholar. The essay is better known as ‘Civil Disobedience’, the title it received in a collection of Thoreau's essays published four years after his death, and I have used that title in the body of the text.

6 An excellent study of this is Lewis, R. W. B., The American Adam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), especially Ch. 1 and 2.Google Scholar

7 Thoreau, Henry D., Journal, Broderick, John C. (gen.ed.) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), I, 235Google Scholar. I have modified punctuation in the interest of readability. Idiosyncratic punctuation in the Journal was modified by Thoreau himself when preparing Journal segments for publication.

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22 Ibid., 230.

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28 Ibid., 119.

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