Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau died in Concord, Massachusetts, on May 6, 1862. He was forty-four. Born there on July 12, 1817, he surveyed, made pencils, walked, and wrote a book about two years in a hut at Walden Pond that later readers treated as scripture and neighbors treated as a local curiosity. He spent a night in jail over a poll tax and turned it into a lecture on civil disobedience that traveled farther than he did. Tuberculosis took him while the Civil War was young. Concord buried him on Authors Ridge, among the same names he had argued with in life. The pond is still there. So is the town.