The Natural History Essays

By Henry David Thoreau

1862

First Published

3.81

Average Rating

288

Number of Pages

8H47M

Audio Length

Henry David Thoreau is America's preeminent literary naturalist; his work has become a mark against which later writers are invariably judged. Still, this popularity is largely based on the widespread familiarity of certain passages from "Walden". Most of his separate essays are comparatively little known. Here collected are all of Thoreau's known natural history essays, including "Huckleberries" and "Walking". This series celebrates the tradition of literary naturalists—writers who embrace the natural world as the setting for some of our most euphoric and serious experiences. Their literary terrain maps the intimate connections between the human and natural worlds, a subject defined by Mary Austin in 1920 as "a third thing... the sum of what passed between me and the Land". Literary naturalists transcend political boundaries, social concerns, and historical milieus; they speak for what Henry Beston called the "other nations" of the planet. Their message acquires more weight and urgency as wild places became increasingly scarce. This series, then, celebrates both a wonderful body of work and a fundamental truth: that nature counts as a model, a guide to how we can live in the world.

Avg Rating

3.81

Number of Ratings

5 STARS

28%

4 STARS

34%

3 STARS

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2 STARS

10%

1 STARS

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Author

Henry David Thoreau

Author · 78 books

Henry David Thoreau (born David Henry Thoreau) was an American author, naturalist, transcendentalist, tax resister, development critic, philosopher, and abolitionist who is best known for Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay, Civil Disobedience, an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state. Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry total over 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions were his writings on natural history and philosophy, where he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern day environmentalism. In 1817, Henry David Thoreau was born in Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard University in 1837, taught briefly, then turned to writing and lecturing. Becoming a Transcendentalist and good friend of Emerson, Thoreau lived the life of simplicity he advocated in his writings. His two-year experience in a hut in Walden, on land owned by Emerson, resulted in the classic, Walden: Life in the Woods (1854). During his sojourn there, Thoreau refused to pay a poll tax in protest of slavery and the Mexican war, for which he was jailed overnight. His activist convictions were expressed in the groundbreaking On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (1849). In a diary he noted his disapproval of attempts to convert the Algonquins "from their own superstitions to new ones." In a journal he noted dryly that it is appropriate for a church to be the ugliest building in a village, "because it is the one in which human nature stoops to the lowest and is the most disgraced." (Cited by James A. Haught in 2000 Years of Disbelief.) When Parker Pillsbury sought to talk about religion with Thoreau as he was dying from tuberculosis, Thoreau replied: "One world at a time." Thoreau's philosophy of nonviolent resistance influenced the political thoughts and actions of such later figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. D. 1862. More: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/tho... http://thoreau.eserver.org/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry\_Da... http://transcendentalism-legacy.tamu.... http://www.biography.com/people/henry...