A Plea for Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau is probably the least popular of our classic American writers. For many, he is too cocky or cranky or preachy. He seems to mock people for doing only what they have to do to get by in an unforgiving world. A very intelligent and well read young woman of my acquaintance said, after reading Walden on school assignment, “Thoreau is a jerk.”

I would reply to my acquaintance that I understand why you say that, but still I must disagree. He was not a jerk.

True, his manners could be forbidding, and he was, on occasion, cocky: literally, for he likened himself to chanticleer, crowing to wake up his slumbering fellow townsmen. “No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof,” he writes. Like Socrates, he believes that the unexamined life is not worth living. Like Socrates, he becomes unpopular by goading people into examining their lives.

But he was often kind and generous; he was true to his word in all his dealings with others; of all the transcendentalists, he alone had a sense of humor; for years he worked to support his family; he loved his brother John and was bedridden with grief when John died of tetanus poisoning; he quit a teaching job, which he badly needed, rather than cane his pupils; he risked a prison sentence helping a fugitive slave escape to Canada.

He was, in addition to all that, a beautiful prose stylist, our greatest nature writer, a courageous fighter for social justice, and a philosopher in the sense that Socrates understood the term, someone who lives philosophy rather than preaching it.

He was still other things, too: a reader of the literatures of Latin, Greek, German, Italian, French, and of Old, Middle, and modern English, a surveyor whose services were sought after because of his accuracy, and the inventor of a superior kind of pencil.

And I would add what I find especially admirable: he alone of the transcendentalists could do things. There was a reason Emerson’s wife liked having him around the house. He could make almost any needed household repairs.

I believe, no, I know, that most people would abandon their dislike of Thoreau on better acquaintance. Making a better acquaintance with Thoreau has become much easier in recent years with the publication of new editions of his works and books about him.

Walden, his masterpiece, is available in numerous paperback editions, with introductions by distinguished writers such as John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates. A fully annotated edition has been produced by Jeffrey Cramer.

Jeffrey Cramer also produced an annotated edition of The Maine Woods.

The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 1837-1861, selections by Damion Searls, is a treasury of patient and loving observations of nature.

A single volume edition of Thoreau’s essays and occasional writings has been published in the Library of America series. This volume is somewhat expensive but look for change behind the cushions of your couch — it is well worth it to have his great essays all in one volume.

Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, by Robert Richardson, is a brilliant, beautifully written intellectual biography.

Henry David Thoreau: A Life, by Laura Dassow Walls, is another brilliant biography.

But what was the point of the millions of words that he left us in books, essays, and journals? It is, I believe, that mankind cannot truly flourish when estranged from nature. This is, of course, a commonplace that has enabled outfitters of weekend outdoor enthusiasts such as L. L. Bean to create commercial empires. But for Thoreau, this was no commonplace. “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” he wrote. His beautiful words brace us to our task, which is to preserve wildness itself from the effects of our radically disrespectful spoliation of nature — that nature of which we are, like it or not, inescapably a part.