American · 1817–1862
Henry David Thoreau was an American essayist, philosopher, and naturalist who became a central figure in the Transcendentalist movement. His experiment in simple living at Walden Pond produced Walden (1854), a meditation on self-reliance and the natural world that has influenced generations of environmentalists and seekers. His essay Civil Disobedience (1849), written after a night in jail for refusing to pay taxes supporting slavery and the Mexican-American War, shaped the strategies of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. A friend and protégé of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau combined close observation of nature with philosophical inquiry, keeping detailed journals that fill twenty volumes.