Contemporary Authors

• Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science University of Wisconsin Press (Madison, WI), 1995
• Emerson's Life in Science: The Culture of Truth Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 2003
• The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 2009
• Henry David Thoreau: A Life University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 2017

. Views of nature https://lccn.loc.gov/2013050786 Humboldt, Alexander von, 1769-1859, author. Ansichten der Natur. English Views of nature / Alexander von Humboldt ; translated by Mark W. Person ; edited by Stephen T. Jackson and Laura Dassow Walls. Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2014.©2014. viii, 313 pages ; 24 cm Q171 .H8613 2014 ISBN: 9780226923185 (cloth : alk. paper)0226923185 (cloth : alk. paper) 2. Alexander von Humboldt and the Americas https://lccn.loc.gov/2012510306 Alexander von Humboldt and the Americas / edited by Vera M. Kutzinski, Ottmar Ette, Laura Dassow Walls. Berlin : Edition Tranvia, 2012. 295 pages : illustrations (partly color) ; 21 cm. Q143.H9 A6733 2012 ISBN: 9783938944639 (pbk.) 3. Thoreauvian modernities : transatlantic conversations on an American icon https://lccn.loc.gov/2012024219 Thoreauvian modernities : transatlantic conversations on an American icon / edited by Francois Specq, Laura Dassow Walls, and Michel Granger. Athens ; London : University of Georgia Press, c2013. xiv, 310 p. : ill. ; 24 cm. PS3054 .T59 2013 ISBN: 9780820344287 (hardcover : alk. paper)0820344281 (hardcover : alk. paper)9780820344294 (pbk. : alk. paper)082034429X (pbk. : alk. paper) 4. The Oxford handbook of transcendentalism https://lccn.loc.gov/2009025814 The Oxford handbook of transcendentalism / edited by Joel Myerson, Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, Laura Dassow Walls. New York : Oxford University Press, 2010. xxxiii, 755 p. : ill. ; 26 cm. PS217.T7 O94 2010 ISBN: 9780195331035 (cloth : alk. paper)0195331036 (cloth : alk. paper) 5. The passage to Cosmos : Alexander von Humboldt and the shaping of America https://lccn.loc.gov/2009003099 Walls, Laura Dassow. The passage to Cosmos : Alexander von Humboldt and the shaping of America / Laura Dassow Walls. Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2009. xv, 404 p. ; ill. ; 24 cm. Q143.H9 D388 2009 ISBN: 9780226871820 (alk. paper)0226871827 (alk. paper) 6. More day to dawn : Thoreau's Walden for the twenty-first century https://lccn.loc.gov/2006028847 More day to dawn : Thoreau's Walden for the twenty-first century / edited by Sandra Harbert Petrulionis and Laura Dassow Walls. Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, c2007. xi, 252 p. ; 23 cm. PS3048 .M67 2007 ISBN: 9781558495760 (cloth : alk. paper)1558495762 (cloth : alk. paper) 7. Emerson's life in science : the culture of truth https://lccn.loc.gov/2002151358 Walls, Laura Dassow. Emerson's life in science : the culture of truth / Laura Dassow Walls. Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 2003. viii, 280 p. ; 25 cm. PS1642.S3 W35 2003 ISBN: 0801440440 (acid-free paper) 8. Seeing new worlds : Henry David Thoreau and nineteenth-century natural science https://lccn.loc.gov/95007401 Walls, Laura Dassow. Seeing new worlds : Henry David Thoreau and nineteenth-century natural science / Laura Dassow Walls. Madison, WI : University of Wisconsin Press, c1995. xiii, 300 p. ; 24 cm. PS3057.N3 D37 1995 ISBN: 02991474010299147444 (pbk.) 9. Henry David Thoreau : a life https://lccn.loc.gov/2016053416 Walls, Laura Dassow, author. Henry David Thoreau : a life / Laura Dassow Walls. Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. xx, 615 pages, [32] pages of plates : illustrations ; 24 cm PS3053 .W28 2017 ISBN: 9780226344690 (cloth : alk. paper)

• University of Notre Dame - http://english.nd.edu/people/faculty/walls/

  Laura Dassow Walls

  Faculty-Walls

  Walls Thoreau Cover

  Willliam P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English
  Graduate Program in History and Philosophy of Science

  Specialty: American Transcendentalism; literature and science; environmental literature

  Degrees: BA and MA, University of Washington; PhD, Indiana University

  Laura Dassow Walls is the author of Henry David Thoreau: A Life, published by the University of Chicago Press in July 2017, in time to honor Thoreau’s 200th birthday. This book, the first full-length, comprehensive biography of Thoreau in a generation, draws on extensive new research and the full range of Thoreau’s published and unpublished writings to present Thoreau as vigorously alive in all his quirks and contradictions—fully embedded in his place and time, yet speaking powerfully to the problems and perils of today.

  Professor Walls works in the field of literature and science, with a special concentration on Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and on American Transcendentalism more generally. Her quest to understand 19th-century American literature in its broad political, historical, and philosophical contexts has led to a continuing interest in British and German writers, philosophers, and scientists as well, particularly the German natural scientist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt. Her book The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (Chicago 2009) traces the Humboldt network from Germany to the Americas in science, politics, literature, and the arts; it earned the Merle Curti Award for intellectual history by the Organization of American Historians, the James Russell Lowell Prize for literary studies by the Modern Language Association, and the Kendrick Prize for literature and science by SLSA, the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. Her earlier books include Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science (Wisconsin 1995), Emerson’s Life in Science: The Culture of Truth (Cornell 2003), and a volume coedited with Joel Myerson and Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism (2010). She looks forward to exploring American Transcendentalism more broadly as an intellectual, social, and environmental reform movement, and she is planning a new work, Earthrise, on how the 19th-century concept of Earth as a living, self-making planet sent out shock waves that still, in this era of global warming, have not subsided. Her work has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the ACLS, the Center for Humans and Nature, and the William P. and Hazel B. White Foundation.

  Selected Recent Books:

  Henry David Thoreau: A Life. University of Chicago Press, 2017.
  Views of Nature by Alexander von Humboldt, a new translation by Mark W. Person. Co-editor with Stephen Jackson. University of Chicago Press, 2014.
  Thoreauvian Modernities: Transatlantic Conversations on an American Icon. Co-editor with François Specq and Michel Granger. University of Georgia Press, 2013.
  The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America. University of Chicago Press, 2009.
  The Oxford Guide to Transcendentalism. Ed. with Joel Myerson and Sandra Harbert Petrulionis. Oxford University Press, 2010.
  More Day to Dawn: Thoreau’s “Walden” for a New Century, with “Afterword.” Co-editor with Sandra Petrulionis. University of Massachusetts Press, 2007.

  Selected Recent Articles:

  “Technology.” Henry David Thoreau in Context, ed. James Finley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. 165-74.
  “Natural History in the Anthropocene.” Cambridge Global History of Literature and the Environment, ed. Louise Wesling and John Parham. Cambridge University Press, 2016. 187-200.
  “‘The Value of Mutual Intelligence’: Science, Poetry, and Thoreau’s Cosmos.” Thoreau at 200: Essays and Reassessments, ed. Kevin Van Anglen and Kristen Case. Cambridge University Press, 2017. 235-255.
  “Of Compass, Chain and Sounding Line: Taking Thoreau’s Measure.” Reasoning in Measurement, ed. Alfred Nordmann and Nicola Mößner. London: Routledge, 2017. 11-24.
  “Cosmos.” Keywords for Environmental Studies, ed. Joni Adamson, William A. Gleason, and David N. Pellow. New York: New York University Press, 2016. 47-50.
  "'As You Are Brothers of Mine': Thoreau and the Irish." New England Quarterly 88.1 (March 2015): 5-36; republished in Emerson and Thoreau: Dimensions of Two Intertwined Careers, MIT Batch for Kindle, April 2015.
  "The Cosmopolitan Project of Louisa May Alcott." Toward a Female Genealogy of Transcendentalism, ed. Jana L. Argersinger and Phyllis Cole. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014: 423-445.
  “Walking West, Gazing East: Planetarity on the Shores of Cape Cod.” In Thoreauvian Modernities: Transatlantic Conversations on an American Icon. Ed. François Specq, Laura Dassow Walls and Michel Granger. University of Georgia Press, 2013. 21-42.
  “Humboldt’s Passage to America.” Alexander von Humboldt and the Americas. Co-editor with Vera Kutzinski and Ottmar Ette. Berlin: Verlag Walter Frey, 2012. 23-50.
  “Articulating a Huckleberry Cosmos: Thoreau’s Moral Ecology of Knowledge.” Thoreau’s Importance for Philosophy, ed. Rich Anthony Furtak and Jonathan Ellsworth. Fordham University Press, 2012. 91-111, 263-65.
  “Geography, Literature, and the Spaces of Interdisciplinarity.” American Literary History 23.4 (2011): 860-72.
  “Greening Darwin’s Century: Humboldt, Thoreau, and the Politics of Hope,” in Victorian Review 36.2 (Fall 2010): 92-103.
  “Of Atoms, Oaks, and Cannibals, or, More Things that Talk” in Isis 101 (September 2010): 590-98.
  “Beyond Representation: Deliberate Reading in a Panarchic World,” in ebr [electronic book review] “Critical Ecologies” thread, posted 7/29/2009. Peer-reviewed academic journal. http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/deliberative
  “Ralph Waldo Emerson and Coleridge’s American Legacy.” Coleridge’s Afterlives, 1834-1934, ed. James Vigus and Jane Wright. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008: 112-27.
  “‘If Body Can Sing’: Emerson and Victorian Science.” Emerson Bicentennial Essays. Ed. Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson. Massachusetts Historical Society/University of Virginia Press, 2006: 334-366.

  Major Honors and Awards:

  NEH Fellowship for 2015 in support of Laura's biography of Henry David Thoreau
  Ralph Waldo Emerson Society Distinguished Achievement Award, 2012
  Guggenheim Fellowship, 2010-11
  James Russell Lowell Prize, Modern Language Association, 2010
  Merle Curti Award, Organization of American Historians, 2010
  Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize, Society for Literature, Science and the Arts, 2010
  Russell Research Award for the Humanities and Social Sciences, University of South Carolina, 2010
  Visiting Professor, Ecole Normale Superieure Lettres et Sciences Humaines, Lyon, France, 2009
  Research Fellowship, Center for Humans and Nature, New York and Chicago, 2007
  NEH Fellowship, 2001-02
  ACLS Fellowship, 1995-96

  Contact Information
  330 Decio Faculty Hall
  (574-) 631-2573
  lwalls@nd.edu

  Postal address
  Department of English
  356 O’Shaughnessy
  Notre Dame, IN 46556

• http://www.electronicbookreview.com/author/laura-dassow-walls - Electronic Books Review

  Laura Dassow Walls

  Laura Dassow Walls is the William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, where she teaches classes in American literature and is affiliated with the History and Philosophy of Science Program. She has published books on Thoreau, Emerson, and Alexander von Humboldt, and numerous articles centering on American Transcendentalism. Currently she is completing a new scholarly biography of Henry David Thoreau.

The radical
M.D. Aeschliman
National Review.
69.15 (Aug. 14, 2017): p38+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 National Review, Inc. http://www.nationalreview.com/
Full Text:
Henry David Thoreau: A Life, by Laura Dassow Walls (Chicago, 640 pp., $35)
'JEFFERSON'S public career focused on securing for Americans," the eminent historian Edmund S. Morgan wrote, "a right of expatriation from the past." Morgan argued that this was a large part of "the meaning of independence" for Jefferson. The more populist and charismatic democrat Andrew Jackson was a proponent, wrote Richard Hofstadter, of "self-assertive subjectivism." Jefferson and Jackson both defeated and replaced Adamses of a more conservative, traditional cast of mind, men who were their moral superiors. However hypocritically and self-interestedly, Jefferson and Jackson offered more radical, flattering definitions of the independence of both self and nation, a development whose literary-philosophical sequel was to be found in the life and work of Emerson and his "Transcendentalist" brethren and their various Romantic, "visionary capitalist," and existentialist disciples, from Walt Whitman to the robber barons, from Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg, and Norman Mailer to our current Jacksonian president.
"Emersonian self-reliance identifies dissent as the quintessentially American gesture," the scholar Sacvan Bercovitch has written, "and then universalizes it as the radical imperative to subjectivity." This is a working out of Jefferson's right of expatriation from the past, giving us what the scholar Quentin Anderson has called, in a powerful 1971 book of this title, "the imperial self." Long after Henry David Thoreau's death in 1862, that protean, shape-shifting barbarian Walt Whitman praised him for his "lawlessness--his dissent--his going his own absolute road let hell blaze all it chooses."
In Samuel Johnson's essay on biography in The Rambler, that great and pious writer said: "I have often thought that there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful." Professor Laura Dassow Walls has provided a fine, exhaustive life of Henry David Thoreau, animated equally by scholarship and sympathy. But mention of the great Johnson, both the author and the subject of biographies, including Boswell's, points up a contrast and presents a problem: Thoreau was a profoundly antisocial and logically contradictory thinker and writer.
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Despite trying to make a case for Thoreau, the scholar Andrew Delbanco noted in 1997 that while Thoreau "wrote reverently about nature," he often wrote "about people with shriveling disdain" and "was corrosively skeptical of all established structures and quick to categorize other men even as he condemned them for having categorical minds." Examining Thoreau's thinking and writing on civil disobedience, the Spanish scholar Maria Jose Falcon y Tella, in her authoritative Civil Disobedience (2000), ultimately deplored Thoreau's self-contradictions and accused him of "violence, arrogance, elitism, and anarchy, ... in the pejorative sense of disorder and chaos," affirming the Italian scholar Giovanni Cosi's view that Thoreau was an "aesthetic anarchist."
Professor Walls thus has her work cut out for her, and she makes a heroic effort to present Thoreau, in this year of the bicentennial of his birth, as sociable, consistent, and ethically noble. The evasive philosophical-rhetorical legacy of Thoreau's guru, Ralph Waldo Emerson, which stimulated the disciple to mystagogic paradox, often noted and criticized in their age, does not make her task easy. She does show how devoted to and dependent on his Concord, Mass., family of domineering women the bachelor Thoreau was, and how much of the life of this hometown he participated in as a land surveyor, neighbor, skilled pencil-maker, odd-jobs man, and Lyceum speaker. She also movingly describes the Thoreau family's role in the Underground Railroad, facilitating the escape of fugitive slaves to Canada in the late 1840s and the 1850s. She praises Thoreau's courage in speaking up influentially for the radical abolitionist John Brown.
Like Joseph Wood Krutch 50 years ago and the contemporary Harvard scholar Lawrence Buell, Walls makes much of Thoreau as a great early ecologist: She has previously written books on this subject, and her discussions of his growing interest and competence as a naturalist provide some of the best pages in her book. She also credits Thoreau with an early and sensitive sympathy for the Native Americans, whom white immigration and growing ideas of "manifest destiny" were rapidly displacing throughout the United States.
But a telltale note at the end of her preface points up a nagging problem with Emerson and Thoreau that will not easily go away: In her book, she tells us, "I capitalize Nature when it names a divine or holy essence, but stay with lowercase nature when the word is used in our modern, secular way." As Perry Miller wrote in 1940, "Fortunately, no one is compelled to take ... seriously" the ideas of Emerson, Thoreau, and the "Transcendentalists." The romantic pantheism of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman did not outlive the advent of Darwinism, though it left a permanent blemish on our K-12 educational system, as E. D. Hirsch has repeatedly argued over the last 40 years. In this regard Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman were children of Rousseau, and John Dewey and his disciples were their descendants, with damaging long-term consequences.
Emerson was the fount of American Romantic pantheism, and his use of the word "Nature" as a God-term led him into recurrent contradictions and evasions. Even his friend and admirer Henry James Sr. worried (in 1884): Emerson was "fundamentally treacherous to civilization, without being at all himself aware of the fact.... He had no conscience, in fact, and lived by perception, which is an altogether lower or less spiritual faculty." Though Emerson was Thoreau's master, and Margaret Fuller his sometime editor and friend, early on both found something deeply unnerving about Thoreau's literary tactics and ideas. In an 1843 journal entry, Emerson wrote of a draft essay by Thoreau: He "sends me a paper with the old fault of unlimited contradiction. The
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trick of his rhetoric is soon learned. It consists in substituting for the obvious word and thought its diametrical antagonist.... It makes me nervous and wretched to read it."
Andrew Delbanco notes that Margaret Fuller rejected an essay of Thoreau's for the Transcendentalist journal The Dial and told him: "The thoughts seem to me so out of their natural order, that I cannot read it through without pain." Delbanco calls Walden "a very intolerant book" and comments that "the point is to attack all received ideas and images until they disintegrate under the assault." He continues: Thoreau's "prose style ... moves almost mechanically back and forth between contradictory assertions.... Beneath this vibration of contraries was a dreadful emptiness.... Thoreau was ultimately a despiser of culture ... [who] faced an abyss of his own creating--the specter of absolute self-reliance more radical than even Emerson contemplated." Thoreau's friend Bronson Alcott wrote insouciantly of him in 1851 that he was "the independent of independents, ... indeed, the sole signer of the Declaration, and a Revolution in himself."
Yet, as many of Emerson's numerous critics noted, the disciple had learned at the master's knee. As Santayana wrote in 1900, "was not the startling effect of much of [Emerson's] writing due to its contradiction to tradition and to common sense?" Saint Augustine "had made a church," Quentin Anderson wrote in 1971, but "Emerson undertook to bring one down--and saw that he would have to take its place." And worse was to come, in the "barbaric yawp" of Walt Whitman and the anarchic immoralism of Emerson's admirer Nietzsche and his admirers, now legion.
Despite the heroically sympathetic effort of Professor Walls, Thoreau was ultimately both an antinomian ("There is no court of appeal whatever," he wrote, "no higher law beyond conscience itself," thereby denying and defying the very foundation of any coherent ethics) and a pharisaical moralist (with what Delbanco calls a "shriveling disdain" for most people). After an 1843 day in New York City, Thoreau recorded the following impression: "I walked through New York yesterday--and met no real and living person." Similar passages of ostentatious contempt can be found in the writings of Emerson, a skeptic who saw life as ultimately illusory: "All is riddle and the key to a riddle is another riddle. There are as many pillows of illusion as flakes in a snowstorm" ("Illusions").
Literary critic Jeffrey Hart, a former senior editor of National Review, wrote well on this ambiguous legacy in these pages ("The Eye and I," December 8, 1997). Earlier, Quentin Anderson argued that figures such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman were ultimately provincial, repetitive, narcissistic nihilists who could tell us nothing about how to live together and who had "emancipated" themselves from the religious, rational, and ethical traditions of the past that animated the best human behavior: Their solipsistic "secular incarnation involves a denial of history and an extreme antinomianism."
Inheriting the austere and homely ethics of early-19th-century New England, Emerson and even Thoreau retained sensible communitarian manners, against the grain of their own thought. But the shape-shifting New York drifter Whitman did not; he understood, as Anderson put it, "that a rejection of Christianity in behalf of an emotional egalitarianism would have to begin with a rejection of the idea that the self was internally structured by conscience." The "image of God" in the human person is the disposition of the human conscience to the good and the true beyond and above itself, in whose pattern and light the human person fulfills himself or herself as a rational-
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moral being. The Hebrews, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and the Christians celebrated and followed this pattern and this light; Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman denied it, with profound and malignant long-term consequences. With this, Nietzsche has arrived; and Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer are on the horizon. NR
Mr. Aeschliman is a professor of Anglophone culture at the University of Italian Switzerland, a professor emeritus of education at Boston University, and the author of The Restitution of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Case against Scientism.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Aeschliman, M.D. "The radical." National Review, 14 Aug. 2017, p. 38+. PowerSearch,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499864042/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=7bab490b. Accessed 19 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A499864042
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Walls, Laura Dassow: HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Kirkus Reviews.
(June 1, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Walls, Laura Dassow HENRY DAVID THOREAU Univ. of Chicago (Adult Nonfiction) $35.00 7, 6 ISBN: 978-0-226-34469-0
A superbly researched and written literary portrait that broadens our understanding of the great American writer and pre-eminent naturalist who has too long been regarded as a self-righteous scold."A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist," wrote Vladimir Nabokov. In Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), this formulation finds its fullest expression, and that's only part of the story. Besides being a great prose stylist and the spiritual father of environmentalism, he was also the author of "Civil Disobedience," which has served as a rallying cry for nonviolent protests ever since. For all that, he's hardly a beloved figure; he's the hermit of Walden Pond, the Concord solipsist sneering at the lesser mortals who lack his independence. In this magnificent new biography, Walls (English/Univ. of Notre Dame; The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America, 2009, etc.) effectively humanizes her subject. The man who will always be regarded by some as the great prig of American literature was deeply involved in 19th-century life. He worked every day, and not just as a relentless writer; he made his living as a handyman, carpenter, expert surveyor, and businessman who helped run his family's pencil-manufacturing company. His friendships, most notably with Ralph Waldo Emerson and others in the transcendentalist movement, were tumultuous but enduring. He was a popular lecturer and an anti-slavery activist. He was also the literary artist who spent nearly a decade trying to describe a year on Walden Pond. The Thoreau on the pages of Walden, writes Walls, "is not the author who so carefully staged the book, but the book's protagonist, who, in the course of the year and a day, is utterly changed by the experience." Thoreau has inspired so many esteemed biographies that it's difficult to claim any new one as definitive. However, Walls delivers a sympathetic and honest portrait that fully captures the private and public life of this singular American figure.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Walls, Laura Dassow: HENRY DAVID THOREAU." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2017.
PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A493329060/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=e2b4edc3. Accessed 19 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A493329060
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Henry David Thoreau: A Life
Publishers Weekly.
264.16 (Apr. 17, 2017): p57. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Henry David Thoreau: A Life
Laura Dassow Walls. Univ. of Chicago, $35 (640p) ISBN 978-0-226-34469-0
In this definitive biography, the many facets of Thoreau are captured with grace and scholarly rigor by English professor Walls (The Passage to Cosmos). By convention, she observes, there were "two Thoreaus, both of them hermits, yet radically at odds with each other. One speaks for nature; the other for social justice." Not so here. To reveal the author of Waiden as one coherent person is Walls's mission, which she fully achieves; as a result of her vigilant focus Thoreau holds the center--no mean achievement in a work through whose pages move the great figures and cataclysmic events of the period. Emerson, Hawthorne, and Whitman are here; so are Frederick Douglass and John Brown. Details of everyday life lend roundness to this portrait as we follow Thoreau's progress as a writer and also as a reader. Walls attends to the breadth of Thoreau's social and political involvements (notably his concern for Native Americans and Irish- Americans and his committed abolitionism) and the depth of his scientific pursuits. The wonder is that, given her book's richness, Walls still leaves the reader eager to read Thoreau. Her scholarly blockbuster is an awesome achievement, a merger of comprehensiveness in content with pleasure in reading. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Henry David Thoreau: A Life." Publishers Weekly, 17 Apr. 2017, p. 57. PowerSearch,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A490820820/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=aa5e08d6. Accessed 19 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A490820820
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More Day to Dawn: Thoreau's Walden
for the Twenty-first Century
Vince Brewton
ForeWord.
(March-April 2007): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2007 ForeWord http://www.forewordmagazine.com
Full Text:
Work Title: More Day to Dawn: Thoreau's Walden for the Twenty-first Century Work Author(s): Sandra Harbert Petrulionis and Laura Dassow Walls, editors University of Massachusetts Press
264 pages, Softcover $24.95
Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9781558495760
Reviewer: Vince Brewton
Thoreau's two-year experiment "to live deliberately" on Walden Pond consecrated that body of water as America's most famous literary landmark. To observe the sesquicentennial of Walden's publication, a group of new and eminent scholars convened in 2004 to reconsider Thoreau's life and work in light of twenty-first century concerns. That conference session has now resulted in the publication of this remarkable collection of essays. The editors (Petrulionis is from Penn State, Altoona; Walls is from the University of South Carolina); propose a new Thoreau for a new century, recasting the iconoclast beyond the framework by which he has been traditionally understood.
Walden has been continuously in print since 1862, but despite Thoreau's popularity he has generally been perceived as a hot ember emitted by Emerson's flame, a secondary Transcendental firebrand snuffed out by a premature death. Nevertheless, the main stream of Thoreau interpretation has consistently maintained his place as the sharpest critic of mid-nineteenth- century American culture. Perhaps more importantly, twentieth-century readers found Thoreau an ally in their anti-war, anti-conformity, and emergent environmentalist concerns.
More Day to Dawn updates that estimate with fresh accounts not just of Walden but other works as well, including manuscripts recently published for the first time, such as Wild Fruits. Assessing the change after his friendship with Emerson had cooled, one contributor describes Thoreau's "traverse from idealism and individualism to materialism and communalism."
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Interesting essays grapple with the troubling violence of Thoreau's rhetoric, his debt to Homer, the legacy of pre-Darwinian evolutionary theory, Thoreau's proto-conservationism, and his canny capacity to see in "facts" the social conventions they mask. Other contributors offer new perspectives on Walden as satire, as comedy, and as exemplary of the georgic mode rather than the more often cited pastoral.
"Men esteem truth remote," Thoreau asserts in Walden, "in the outskirts of the system, behind the farthest star, before Adam and after the last man. In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here." This Thoreau too is amply evident in More Day to Dawn---Thoreau the relentless advocate of the here and now reminding readers that the essential activity of life is living.
In the still little-known manuscript published as Wild Fruits in 2000, Thoreau suggests, "You cannot buy that pleasure which [a huckleberry] yields to him who truly plucks it. You cannot buy a good appetite, even. In short you may buy a servant or a slave, but you cannot buy a friend." Gathering up a basket of shrewd and readable essays, More Day to Dawn bears good fruit to readers of Thoreau who truly pluck it.
Vince Brewton
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Brewton, Vince. "More Day to Dawn: Thoreau's Walden for the Twenty-first Century."
ForeWord, Mar.-Apr. 2007. PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A163247762 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=2dd1fde1. Accessed 19 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A163247762
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More Day to Dawn: Thoreau's Walden for the Twenty-first Century
ForeWord.
(Aug. 19, 2009): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2009 ForeWord http://www.forewordmagazine.com
Full Text:
Sandra Harbert Petrulionis and Laura Dassow Walls editors; MORE DAY TO DAWN: THOREAU'S WALDEN FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY; University of Massachusetts Press $0.00 ISBN: 9781558495760
Thoreau's two-year experiment "to live deliberately" on Walden Pond consecrated that body of water as America's most famous literary landmark. To observe the sesquicentennial of Walden's publication a group of new and eminent scholars convened in 2004 to reconsider Thoreau's life and work in light of twenty-first century concerns. That conference session has now resulted in the publication of this remarkable collection of essays. The editors (Petrulionis is from Penn State Altoona; Walls is from the University of South Carolina); propose a new Thoreau for a new century recasting the iconoclast beyond the framework by which he has been traditionally understood.
Walden has been continuously in print since 1862 but despite Thoreau's popularity he has generally been perceived as a hot ember emitted by Emerson's flame a secondary Transcendental firebrand snuffed out by a premature death. Nevertheless the main stream of Thoreau interpretation has consistently maintained his place as the sharpest critic of mid-nineteenth- century American culture. Perhaps more importantly twentieth-century readers found Thoreau an ally in their anti-war anti-conformity and emergent environmentalist concerns.
More Day to Dawn updates that estimate with fresh accounts not just of Walden but other works as well including manuscripts recently published for the first time such as Wild Fruits. Assessing the change after his friendship with Emerson had cooled one contributor describes Thoreau's "traverse from idealism and individualism to materialism and communalism." Interesting essays grapple with the troubling violence of Thoreau's rhetoric his debt to Homer the legacy of pre- Darwinian evolutionary theory Thoreau's proto-conservationism and his canny capacity to see in "facts" the social conventions they mask. Other contributors offer new perspectives on Walden as satire as comedy and as exemplary of the georgic mode rather than the more often cited pastoral.
"Men esteem truth remote" Thoreau asserts in Walden "in the outskirts of the system behind the farthest star before Adam and after the last man. In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here." This Thoreau too is amply evident in More Day to Dawn--Thoreau the relentless advocate of the here and now reminding readers that the essential activity of life is living.
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In the still little-known manuscript published as Wild Fruits in 2000 Thoreau suggests "You cannot buy that pleasure which [a huckleberry] yields to him who truly plucks it. You cannot buy a good appetite even. In short you may buy a servant or a slave but you cannot buy a friend." Gathering up a basket of shrewd and readable essays More Day to Dawn bears good fruit to readers of Thoreau who truly pluck it.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"More Day to Dawn: Thoreau's Walden for the Twenty-first Century." ForeWord, 19 Aug. 2009.
PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A236035063/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=b81ecec1. Accessed 19 Dec. 2017.
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Truth and power. (Books)
Ray Percival
New Scientist.
179.2402 (July 5, 2003): p50+. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2003 New Scientist Ltd.. For more science news and comments, see http://www.newscientist.com.
http://www.newscientist.com/
Full Text:
Emerson's Life in Science
by Laura Dassow Walls, Cornell University Press, $35, ISBN 0801440440
ON HIS first tour of Europe, Ralph Waldo Emerson had a revelation in the Paris Museum of Natural History. "I will be a naturalist," he declared. This insight was the basis for his lifelong fascination and commitment to science, and its mark is discernible throughout his writings. On returning to the US, Emerson gave a series of lectures on science, which formed the material for his first book, Nature (1836). Laura Dassow Walls argues in Emerson's Life in Science that, far from being simply a dreamer and a mystic, Emerson was an intellectual leader, promoting the idea that science was the path to truth and therefore power. He established this ethos in American society almost single-handedly.
Thus Emerson entered the long-standing debate about the compatibility of science and poetry. The poet Keats had complained that Newton had destroyed the beauty of the rainbow by reducing it to a prism. But to Emerson it seemed that Newton had revealed only another aspect of the rainbow.
Walls shows how Emerson was heavily influenced by philosopher Francis Bacon. Emerson adopted Bacon wholesale: his pantheism, his inductive view of the scientific method, and his prediction that the whole of science would one day be reducible to a few unifying principles.
Walls also makes it clear that there is far more to Emerson than a mere Baconian disciple. The evolution of ideas on the grand scale is a fascinating problem, and Walls's exploration of Emerson, the dominant American prophet of science and technology, opens up this world for a delightful and revealing read.
Ray Percival hosts the Karl Popper website at www.eeng.dcu.le/~tkpw Percival, Ray
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Percival, Ray. "Truth and power. (Books)." New Scientist, 5 July 2003, p. 50+. PowerSearch,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A105659189/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=5dcd9aac. Accessed 19 Dec. 2017.
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Laura Dassow Walls, The Passage to
Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and
the Shaping of America
John Burt
Wordsworth Circle.
42.4 (Autumn 2011): p281+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2011 Wordsworth Circle http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/english/journal/wordsworth/
Full Text:
The Passage to Cosmos is as wide-ranging, as integrative, as creative, and as suggestive, as the man of science who is at its center. Alexander von Humboldt played a crucial role in a dizzying variety of fields: from astronomy and geology, to plant ecology and physical geography, to oceanography and the study of oceanic circulatory systems (such as the "Humboldt Current"), to anthropology and linguistics (with the help of his brother Wilhelm's innovative accounts of language), to the exploration of the most isolated parts of the globe, to the excavation of the obliterated histories of the vanished empires of the New World, to history, poetry, and line art. Geology, biology, chemistry, and statistics were all in his ambit, and Lyell, Lamarck, Liebig and Quetelet were all in his circle. In Walls, Humboldt has found a reader whose originality, diligence, curiosity and moral passion resembles his own. Walls' book gives the reader a vivid sense of why this fertile polymath meant so much to so many people, how he seemed to provide a kind of key to all knowledge. She also Comes to grips with the question of why his influence faded. But most of all, she makes a case for the value of recovering his way of knowing for the contemporary world, and the ways in which some of the most advanced thinkers are only now rediscovering insights that Humboldt proclaimed almost two centuries ago.
The author's central idea is captured in the word used as the title of Humboldt's own magnum opus, "Cosmos," an ancient word Humboldt revived as a term of art to describe his idiosyncratic discipline. In Humboldt's usage the Cosmos is not only the heavens, but also the principle of order that binds together high abstractions and acutely rendered particulars at all scales, from the galactic to the molecular. Humboldt's aim was not to arrive at an abstract rule which transcends all of its instances, but at a richly historical pattern to which the particulars continue to contribute interpretive depth. The word conveys a sense that the universe is orderly, but also rich and turbulent, not static, so that the beholder's sense of what that order is inexhaustibly unfolds. Further, as one might expect from the fact that the word "cosmos" and "cosmetic" come from the same root, the word captures a sense that the beauty of this order is a part of its meaning; aesthetics has a heuristic role, not merely a decorative one. in Humboldt's science. Finally, the term "cosmos" bridges the subjective and the objective worlds; the fact that the human Intelligence appreciates the order it behold's is a pant of that order.
The Passage to Camas is thus as much a recovery operation as an interpretation, but it is also a
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vindication) of Humboldt against, the views of recent detractors. who assimilate his expeditions and studies to the imperial exploitation and racist repression that has been so much the focus of recent scholarship about the 19th century. Now William Lewis Herndon. whose expedition 10 the Amazon was a kind of scouting party designed to prepate For the expansion of the North American slave economy to South America, and John C. Fremont, whose explorations of the American West went hand in hand with its military subjugation, indeed did think of themselves as followers of Humboldt. And the most important purvevors of scientific racism. Louis Aggasiz and Samuel Morton, who argued that the differenecs between rates were essentialh differences between higher and lower species of the genus homo, also did indeed think of themselves as Humboldt's followers. Even worse. John Sidney Thrasher's doctored and expurgated translation of Humboldt study of Cuba did. to Humboldt's outrage, convey the impression that Humholdt showed is racial and poliiical ambitions of the nuscent (lonfederae But il Humboldt did imagine the Orinoco, and even the still-isolaied Oasiuiare (which, Humboldt showed, connects the watersheds of the Amazon and the Orinoco is ways that had been thought to be phvsiealh impossible!, becoming a thoroughfare of world commerce like the Rhine, his project was the integration of the world, not exploitation and conquest, and he was unremittingly critical of the economic and cultural practices of the imperial powers. Humholdt also unfailingly argued for the unity and common destiny of the human race, and was a consistent ctitic of racism and slavery. Herndon and Aggasiz can claim descent hom Humboldt, bat their Views are no more the inevitable developments of Humboldt's thought than social Darwinism and eugenics were the inevitable developmentsof Danvin's dieon of evolution, and the openness to the varieties human culture one associate with Xora Neale Hurston's Of Mules and Men, a work which reflects het graduate study with Humboldt's follower, the anthropologist Fran/Boas, owvn as much to Humboldt as Aggasiz's raeism does. The Passage to Cosmos persuasively locales Humboldt in "a cosmopolitan, high-minded, reform-centered clerisy that sought to rise above divisive sectional and national interests to create a worldwide network ot progressive intellectual leaders, authors and teachers." (117)
Humboldt's habit ot mind is everywhere in 19th century culture, particularly in the United Slates, Thoreau's unification of natural science and art, particularly in his late biological work, is in Humboldt's spirit, as is Whitman's passion for the immanent life of Being. William Hickling Prescott's and Francis Parkman's aim to hold logether geography history, and Culture in their grand accounts ot Mexican and Canadian history are also Humboldnan in cast. Frederic Church's an owes both its method and its frenuent subjects to Humboldt. Francis Lieber's legal and political analysis reflects Humboldt's influence, as does Boas' anthropology. And naturalists from John Muir and Susan Cooper through James Lovelock show Humboldtian traits, even current theories of deforestation and global warming owe something to Humboldt.
The attraction of Humboldt's way of doing science is its ability to speak to both sides of what C. P. Snow called the "two cultures" of science and literature, because his evident is always rigorously empirical al and subject to verification. but is placed in a richly interpretable whole, in which lad. beauty, science and poetry, are both in play. Humboldt's view is holistic, but be synthesizes holism arid empiricism, always reaching up to holism from the radiant particulars rather than down from (he grand theory to the mere facts. In Walls' phrase. Humboldt romanced the allness of livings through their eachness. Humboldt transcends the distinction Fran/Boas adapted from Kant that divides natural science (which compares natural facts but seeks only lo
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find a general law) and historical science (which cherishes the particulars and uses feeling and beauty heuristically to help frame interpretation). The respect for particulars and die recognition that interpretation involves recovery of narratives also ties Humboldt's thought to the practice of "thick description" developed by Clifford Geertz.
Humboldt enables one to recover the poetry of science, a way. like Thoreau in Walls' account of him. "to practice science as a poet, and to be a poet by means of the singular objects and discipline of science" (vii). But Hum-boldt also, in Walls' account, enables a more holistic practice of literary criticism, able to read the literature of scientific exploration as something other than as mere raw material for the study of novels or poems or as n parallel expression of the ideological agendas that also shape novels or poems.
That said, the attractions of Humboldt's scientific method require very strict limitations upon how these. aesthetic elements come into play in science. Aesthetic elements may safely be conceded heuristic power. They may at live margins even have regulative power, insofar as the question of the satisfactoriness of an interpretation is still an aesthetic question; it is aesthetics, ultimately, and not physics. which makes physicists unhappy with ad hot theories, and it is are thetics, and not mathematics, which underlies the mathematician's preference for elegant proofs over brute force proofs or her sense that an ugh formalism music in some unspecified was kick power, It is sill easier to imagine such aesthetic considerations as being in play in biology, which cannot specil laws in the wav physics specifies laws and whose methods are always more or less interpretive, but to give aesthetic considerations constitutive rather than regulative force is to lave science behind.
What caused Humboldt's influence to decline is perhaps the very thing that The Passage to Cosmos to recover from him. Traditionally Humboldt's decline is attributed to Darwin's rise, although as The Passage to Cosmos points out. Darwin might not himself have seen it that way, since he thought of himself as following in Humboldt's footsteps. The difference between them isn't that Humboldt's nature was idealized where Darwin's was harsh. It is that Darwinism proved better able to survive and abet what Max Weber in his crucial 1918 essay "Science as a Vocation" called "the disenchantment of the world."
Weber's phrase could mean two things, only one of which really bears on Humboldt. Weber meant first of all that in a disenchanted world thinkers no longer invoke divinities or spirits to explain events. The requirement of acknowledging the disenchantment of the world not only compels one to give up magical thinking and the idea of providence but also compels one to give up natural theology entirely: the beauty of the natural world is not a sign of God's goodness and its older is not a stem of God's designing will. The Passage to Cosmos points out that unlike many of his followers. Emerson for instance, Humboldt was willing to take this step, and thought of himself as a thoroughgoing materialist.
But true disenchantment requires a further step, and it was his failure to take this step that both accounts for the fading of Humboldt's reputation and for the promise he offers to an intellectual culture that has forgotten his example. For modernity asks one not only to give up the idea that this world is immanent, is saturated with the radiance of the divine; it also asks one to give up the idea that fact and value stand in any relation to each other beyond arbitrary acts of decision which
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amount to a kind of will to power over reality.
Now when one promises to separate fact and value mostly what one promises is not to load the dice of ones accounts of the world in favor of one's own most cherished prejudices, and in a sectarian, politicized world like this one, where people scour the earth in search of evidence to confirm the dogmas they already hold about it, making such a promise is something intellectual good faith requires. But modern culture has come to take the separation of fact and value in a far harsher way. Particularly where human beings are concerned, modern people have come believe that objectivity requires them to see human doings as instances of behavior rather than of agency. if the account of a human event is to be called scientific, this is to say, it must be tied back to some non-moral formalism, for instance to reproductive success, in evolutionary biology, or to efficiency, in economics. Satisfying the requirement to ground understanding in this kind of formalism, whether in Darwinian fundamentalism, or in market fundamentalism, is the precondition of the claim that an account is scientific. The effect is that moderns must treat everything that distinguishes agency from behavior as ii it were a sentimental illusion. Nowadays one can explain the causes of what people do, but never their reasons; the latter-are at best arbitrary "value judgments" and leaps of faith, or at worst mind-forged manacles, illusions confected in the service of the strong, or biological compulsions reflected into an abstract space. Oddly, nobody is ever finally successful in disenchanting the world, because people almost inevitably wind up investing some non-moral thing, biology or economics, with unearned moral force, so that they give up magic spooks only to embrace an even more debasing idolatry.
It is Humboldt's ability to bridge the two cultures that is the source of his attraction. But it is also what dated him. At this time it seems sentimental to seek to heal an intellectual culture foreshortened by the brutalities it has chosen to be proud of, by its fascination with economies of force and its temptations to give those economies of force unearned moral weight. But maybe living something like that isn't sentimental but heroic, in the way Don Quixote is heroic.
(University of Chicago Press, 2009) xv + 404 $35 A Review by John Burt Brandeis University Burt, John
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Burt, John. "Laura Dassow Walls, The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the
Shaping of America." Wordsworth Circle, vol. 42, no. 4, 2011, p. 281+. PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A286011132/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=d35f365c. Accessed 19 Dec. 2017.
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Michael Granger, Francios Specq and Laura Dassow Walls, eds. Thoreauvian Modernities: Transatlantic
Conversations on an American Icon
Paul J. Medeiros
Philosophy in Review.
34.1-2 (February-April 2014): p30+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2014 University of Victoria http://www.academicprintingandpublishing.com/
Full Text:
Michael Granger, Francios Specq and Laura Dassow Walls, eds. Thoreauvian Modernities: Transatlantic Conversations on an American Icon. Athens: University of Georgia Press 2013.
310 pages
$69.95 (cloth ISBN 978-0-8203-4428-7);
$24.95 (paper ISBN 978-0-8203-4429-4)
The 19th century author Henry David Thoreau may belong among the early North American philosophers. This proposal receives some justification from the celebrated fact that the writers, teachers, sermonists, and activists among whom Thoreau belonged were all deeply impressed by European idealism. Today, this proposal receives additional justification from contemporary scholars, who discern in Thoreau's compositions anticipation of trends in areas of 20th Century philosophy, analytic and continental. Published in 2013, Thoreauvian Modernities offers a collection of new essays giving evidence for the latter claim. For the international team of contributors, Thoreau may be regarded as among the 19th Century thinkers truly ahead of the age and anticipating the thought of contemporary philosophers like John Rawls and Hans-George Gadamer. What the reader of Thoreauvian Modernities must decide is whether the claims to Thoreau's modernity truly succeed in deflating the appraisal that regards Thoreau as a mere anti- modern or as an author expressing nostalgia for pre-modern existence. For among the 20th Century's intellectual lessons must be the caution that tirades, nostalgia, and primitivism offer us fruitless guidance.
For scholars committed to exploring areas of philosophy, Thoreauvian Modernities promises a selection of four essays, of the sixteen total, devoted to "Thoreau and Philosophy." These essays
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explore the author's intellectual commitment to ontology in "Being is the Great Explainer: Thoreau and the Ontological Turn," to virtuous character in "Character and Nature: Toward an Aristotelian Understanding of Thoreau's Literary Portraits and Environmental Poetics," and to personal autonomy in "A Sort of Hybrid Product: Thoreau's Individualism between Liberalism and Communitarianism." Not one of the "Thoreau and Philosophy" essays explicitly takes up the question of whether the literary compositions of the author Thoreau may be explored and taught as genuine contributions to philosophy. Moreover, one of the four essays, "Thoreau's Work on Myth: The Modern and the Primitive" explores not philosophy at all, but the New England author's concept and use of mythology. But this aberration on the part of the editors seems compensated by additional essays in the third part of the collection, "Thoreau, Language, and the Wild," where philosophical themes are again explored. There, an American professor of English, in "Thoreau's Radical Empiricism: The Kalendar, Pragmatism, and Science," presents the author's aim to reconceive scientific, nature study as restoring the situatedness of human life and a British scholar, in "The Maze of Phenomena: Perception and Particular Knowledge in Thoreau's Journal," makes the case for the interpretation of Thoreau's vision of poetic science in the terms given by Immanuel Kant's critical philosophy.
Of the sixteen contributors, only one scholar is listed as actively pursuing studies in Philosophy in addition to English, Literature, and American Studies. This is the French contributor Joseph Urbas, Professor of American Literature at the Universite Michel de Montaigne--Bordeaux III and author of the insightful essay, "Being is the Great Explainer." Because all sixteen contributors are allied to the aforementioned areas of study, Thoreauvian Modernities may give us insight into possible kinships between Literature and Philosophy, as well as between these areas and areas of biology and of linguistics and writing. What becomes clear is that, for the author Thoreau as for the contemporary scholar of Thoreau, rigid distinctions among the disciplines and among the phenomena of study cannot be meaningfully maintained. To consider the truths given in the compositions of Thoreau must be to entertain the question of the unity of knowledge, as well as the possibility of alternate mediums, like poetry, journal writing, novels, orations, and philosophical essays, for the expression of truth.
Henry Thoreau left us examples of all these. For the inchoate Thoreau scholar, what Thoreauvian Modernities teaches is that the author's multitudinous journal, now thoroughly studied and carefully prepared for future study, provides us insight into the philosophical reasonings of the author of celebrated, moral compositions like "Civil Disobedience" and "Life Without Principle." What is surprising to learn is that the author Thoreau, in the journal, is very often concerned with what he perceives to be the misleading claim to objectivity in modern science and, by contrast, the appeal for him of the romantic, idealist proposal that truth, moral truths and spiritual truths especially, may be learned through the patient, passionate observation of particular, relative phenomena in nature. From Thoreauvian Modernities, one also learns that the author's reasoned commitments are, for many, obscured by his penchant for mainstream, scientific activities like empirical measurements and assiduous record-keeping. One remarkable product of this personal activity, a lengthy almanac of local, natural phenomena, suggests to some scholars that the maturing Henry Thoreau departs from the idealism expressed in his most celebrated compositions.
"Thoreau's Radical Empiricism," the essay by an American Professor of English, proposes to
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help solve the question of the author's adverse commitments to spiritual idealism, on the one hand, and to verifiable, empirical science, on the other. According to Kristen Case, the New England author was, above all, concerned with giving expression to an empirical science the aim of which is to restore human life to the natural world. For Thoreau, she claims, this means an empirical science distinguished by artistic, subjective reports that provide needed orientation, as opposed to the dry, abstract reports of mainstream science. For example, Professor Case notes that Thoreau's personal almanac, the Kalendar, records the month of November as the month for taking shelter. This is as much to say that, for Thoreau, as for Emerson, all philosophical, literary, and science pursuits are, in the end, moral pursuits and that moral pursuits are to be understood as those pursuits orienting human life into belonging upon Earth. Professor Case suggests that the author's concept of science anticipates areas of 19th Century American pragmatism. But pragmatism is never defined by Professor Case; those among us committed to the idealist interpretation of the New England author may yet find in Thoreau's Kalender grounds for an idealist interpretation of the author's nature study along the lines given by George Berkeley's immaterialism, where perceived reality must always be reported as mind-dependent.
The British contributor, Michael Jonik, Lecturer at the University of Sussex, argues in the essay "The Maze of Phenomena: Perception and Particular Knowledge in Thoreau's Journal" that the author's evident concern for the observation of particular phenomena in nature may be grounded in the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Clearly, Jonik has in mind to defend the aforementioned purists, who wish to interpret all Thoreau's authorial activities in terms of idealism.
Most successful among the collection's philosophy essays is that of Professor Urbas: "Being is the Great Explainer." The title, we are told, originates as a statement in Thoreau's journal. The French scholar provides an erudite survey of the 19th Century movement of idealism to which the author belonged and gives evidence that, above all, New England idealism pursued an ontological project in contradistinction to the worldly, epistemological project inherited from modern, European philosophy and the 17th Century's John Locke. Whereas Locke would debunk the very idea of "substance" and whereas the modern world would translate culture and wild forests alike into superfluous appearances, the American idealists, claims Professor Urbas, were each given toward championing our sense of being, the being of spirit especially. The scholar finds ample evidence for this claim in Thoreau's novel Walden, where the author exhorts the homeless of New England to locate the needed sense of genuine reality by which to build our flourishing life. For many philosophers, more thinking will be needed for the essay to make conclusive that the encounter with fundamental being of Henry Thoreau is significantly different from the epistemological search for justification of modern philosophy. One key to distinguishing Thoreau's philosophy may reside in the aim of moral philosophy, if we understand moral philosophy to explore the orientation and possible boundaries of human life. For Thoreau, the recovery of our sense of being is the needed condition of our moral situatedness upon Earth. John Locke, for his part, does not share this moral concern as much as the intellectual concern about beguiling metaphysics and bad science.
Given that some areas of 20th Century philosophy has come to repent the modern quest for justified knowledge, Professor Urbas claims that the "ontological turn" of 19th Century America places Thoreau and others among the truly modern. At the same time, the New England author's
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own compositions seem, to Urbas, at times problematically obscured by an understanding of being as permanence. In other words, for Professor Urbas it may be that Thoreau, too, was concerned with locating justification, if not for the purpose of certainty, then for the purpose of securing a genuinely, moral life. The well-known problems that arise for foundational epistemology arise, by analogy, for the foundational, moral philosophy of the author Thoreau.
The international team of editors of Thoreauvian Modernities promise a conversation that bridges national boundaries and linguistic differences. The editors inform the reader that the collection derives from an unprecedented, academic conference: "the first ever such meeting on European soil devoted to Thoreau" held, in 2009, in Lyon, France at, we must suppose, the University of Lyon. This academic conference more or less coincides with the one-hundred and fifty anniversary of the August 1854 publication of Walden; Or, Life in the Woods in Massachusetts. So, if anniversaries are meaningful indicators of importance, there is reason to believe the collection timely. However, far less certain is the claim that the collection achieves the laudable, international goals announced by the editors. Remarkably, none of the eleven essays authored in northern Europe are provided in their native languages; the North American reader may easily and falsely believe that all essays were originally composed in American-English. This oversight does little to build the sense, among North American readers especially, that there exist counterparts in greater Europe with whom unprecedented conversations about Thoreau are possible. Indeed, to read the European essays is to hear the selfsame, academic voice heard throughout North America speaking back at us. We may perhaps celebrate this as an accomplishment of our age, but the promised diversity of Thoreauvian Modernities is not at all evident. Among the North American contributions, including those of the editor and professor, Laura Dassow Walls, there seems no intention to converse with the European audience that must have been attending at the conference in Lyon.
In the same vein, the compositions of the scholars shows us that between northern Europe and North America, there is more in common intellectually than there is different. The collection gives evidence that the trans-Atlantic academic world represented in Thoreauvian Modernities shares the exact same authorities and the same library of texts. Professor Christian Maul's (Germany) "A Sort of Hybrid: Thoreau's Individualism Between Liberalism and Communitarianism", one of four "Thoreau and Philosophy" essays, may refer easily to the theory of justice of the American philosopher John Rawls and Professor Joseph Urbas (France) may refer easily to the works of Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. The laudable, international aims of the collection invite the concern that areas of world scholarship remain unrepresented and un-voiced and that Thoreau scholarship, at present, is the property of an elite few; we, for our part, remain the poorer.
Paul J. Medeiros Bridgewater State University Medeiros, Paul J.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Medeiros, Paul J. "Michael Granger, Francios Specq and Laura Dassow Walls, eds. Thoreauvian
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Modernities: Transatlantic Conversations on an American Icon." Philosophy in Review, vol. 34, no. 1-2, 2014, p. 30+. PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A386416139 /GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=84be0e12. Accessed 19 Dec. 2017.
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Dassow Walls, Laura. The Passage to
Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and
the Shaping of America
Caroline Schaumann
The German Quarterly.
83.4 (Fall 2010): p503+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2010 American Association of Teachers of German http://www.aatg.org
Full Text:
Dassow Walls, Laura. The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. 424 pp. $35.00 cloth.
Whereas Alexander von Humboldt's legacy has soared in Germany in the past decade thanks, in part, to the two-hundredth anniversary of his American journey and the one-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of his death, the response in the United States has been much more muted. But there have been some notable exceptions. Along with Aaron Sachs's The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism (2006), Laura Dassow Walls's The Passage to Cosmos (2009) aims to fill the American dearth. The Humboldt Current uncovers surprising connections by digging deep into the works of J.N. Reynolds, Clarence King, George Wallace Melville, and John Muir. The Passage to Cosmos covers even more ground, even if the book remains more at the interpretative surface. Dassow Walls makes a broad stroke--from Humboldt's beginnings to his journey to the Americas (1799-1804) to his later career in Germany to his death at age eighty-nine--but the true focus of the book lies in Humboldt's crowning work Cosmos and, like The Humboldt Current, its manifold influence on North American writers, philosophers, and painters.
Dassow Walls's book offers a wealth of information likely to be helpful to both the scholar and the general reader. Aside from (re)introducing Humboldt to a North American audience, Dassow Walls deserves high praise for her comprehensive delineation of Humboldt's stance on race and slavery. Citing examples from Humboldt's Personal Narrative, Cosmos, and the controversial Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, she contends that Humboldt "was the only major scientist during the nineteenth century to argue consistently, ..., that 'race' was not a biological category ..." (174). At the same time, she elucidates the many ways in which Humboldt's passionate anti-slavery stance was silenced in North America by Humboldt's student Louis Agassiz and other polygenists of the day. Dassow Walls reveals that Humboldt's essay on Cuba was reframed and completely twisted in the English translation by the proslavery Southerner John Sidney Thrasher. In this context, Dassow Walls explicates his interaction with the native populaces. Additionally, she also offers a fascinating analysis of Humboldt's lifelong correspondence with Thomas Jefferson.
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Many other important insights remain buried somewhere in the overall narrative where it often becomes difficult to distill specific arguments or follow the general thread. Perhaps Dassow Walls has simply taken on too much by providing a book both on the omnivorously faceted Humboldt himself and his complicated reception in North America; on Humboldt's upbringing, the American journey, his late work Cosmos, and his influence on Emerson, Poe, Thoreau, Church, Whitman, Muir, Marsh, and others. Yet without a tightly-argued focus, Dassow Walls's rich arguments often get lost in scattered descriptions and well-traveled tangents.
While Dassow Walls provides a compelling and beautifully written narrative of Humboldt's life, the persuasive and sometimes lofty narration tends to thicken and embellish anecdotes from Humboldt's own travel descriptions without critical detachment. Moreover, the author at times employs over-cooked metaphors and hyperboles that give the contemporary American reader a misleading sense of place and time, for instance when she calls Humboldt's Vue des Cordilleres a "massive coffee-table extravaganza" (1). I also find the book's referencing and quotation practice cumbersome and problematic: While the text brims with quotations, they are mostly limited to phrases and expressions taken out of their original context, and only referenced in a general footnote after each paragraph that provides no specific page numbers or texts. This might make for an easier, less distracting read for a general audience but compromises the book's use for scholarly research, blurring the lines between primary source and secondary storytelling.
Even though Dassow Walls professes to "write as an Americanist trained to keep rigorously within the bounds of America" (xi), it is a pity that her interpretation of Humboldt's works remains entirely dependent on English translations, many of which date back to the nineteenth century and are often rather liberal (including the literary translations from French into English by British novelist and poet Helen Maria Williams who spun Humboldt's texts with a decidedly romantic bent). German words in Dassow Walls's text are at times grievously misspelled (such as calling Hamburg the center of Amerikunde [sic, 12]). Dassow Walls's extensive bibliography of over 200 entries on Humboldt contains no French sources, one Spanish, and less than ten sources in German. By her own admission, such reliance on English-language sources is regrettable for a book that in its very premise bemoans Humboldt's absence in North-American scholarship. Overall, the volume marks an important contribution to an under-researched topic, even though the academic reader may wish for more precise scholarly work.
CAROLINE SCHAUMANN Emory University Schaumann, Caroline
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Schaumann, Caroline. "Dassow Walls, Laura. The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt
and the Shaping of America." The German Quarterly, vol. 83, no. 4, 2010, p. 503+. PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A243634245/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=167a743b. Accessed 19 Dec. 2017.
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THE PASSAGE TO COSMOS:
Alexander von Humboldt and the
Shaping of America
Jonathan M. Smith
The Geographical Review.
100.4 (Oct. 2010): p609+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2010 American Geographical Society https://www.amergeog.org
Full Text:
THE PASSAGE TO COSMOS: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America. BY LAURA DASSOW WALLS. XV and 404 pp.; maps, ills., bibliog., index. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 9780226871820.
Readers who know Alexander von Humboldt as anything more than a cobwebbed bust in the pantheon of geography will, in all likelihood, remember him as the patriarch of "Humboldtian science." Walls cleverly reduces the axioms of Humboldtian science to the motto "Explore, Collect, Measure, Connect," a method that many see as the foundation of geography's chorological tradition. Not a few have contended that it is the foundation of geography itself. The chorological tradition defines geography as the study of Zusammenhang, which is to say the integration of disparate elements into areal associations, at all scales, from the local to the global. Humboldt certainly propounded this view, as did Immanuel Kant, Ferdinand von Richthofen, Alfred Hettner, Richard Hartshorne, and, more recently, David Stoddart.
Walls's purpose in this book is to present Humboldt as the great foundational prophet of Zusammenhang; however, areal association of geographical phenomena is only part of what she tells us was hung together by the great German's poetic imagination. Cosmos, the title of Humboldt's most famous work (in five volumes), is for Walls a symbol of comprehensive ecological, political, and epistemological harmony, and she has written this book in the hope of using this symbol, and the figure of Humboldt, to propagate this holistic vision. Walls offers our imaginations the symbol of cosmos, and the figure of Humboldt, in the hope that they will inspire us to transcend divisions, not only between humans and nature but also between culture and culture, body and spirit, science and art.
There is a great deal of sound scholarship in this lucid and informative book, but its primary purpose--like that of a book--is doctrinal. It is at heart a very persuasive argument that Humboldt should be recognized as the intellectual grandsire of all those postmodern intellectuals who embrace environmentalism, progressive politics, the arts, and a vaguely pantheistic spirituality that vacillates between worship of history and worship of nature. This amalgamated creed, so prevalent among contemporary liberals, is often called "sustainability," and Walls has unquestionably done its disciples a singular service in identifying their doctrines with a man of
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Humboldt's stature. She also helped this sustainability skeptic to comprehend Humboldt the materialist scientist, Humboldt the republican revolutionary, and Humboldt the pantheist mystic.
When I say that Walls presents the symbol of cosmos and the figure of Humboldt to our imaginations, I mean she pitches her appeal to our desires rather than our reason. Cosmos is, at least superficially, an attractive symbol that promises fulfillment of much that humans hope for. Humboldt is, likewise, an attractive figure, who seems to merit emulation. There is nothing wrong with appealing to imagination. Human will is much more effectively governed by imagination--by symbols, images, heroes, and stories--than by reason, and every doctrine, including rationalism, spreads through successful appeals to the imagination. My quarrel is with the symbol of cosmos itself, which is certainly Utopian, probably misleading, and possibly dangerous. A will that has fallen under this image of cosmos will be, I submit, a bad will.
Humboldt embodied that strange combination of rationalism and romanticism that flowed out of the French Enlightenment. It is a stream that flows undiminished to this day. Then as now, those who drink from it profess great confidence in the power of human reason to solve problems, while professing equal confidence in the purity of natural human sentiments as guides to action. Trust your feelings, they tell us, but use your heads. Irving Babbit gave the name "humanitarianism" to this sentimental instrumentalism, this wedding of Bacon and Rousseau, and blamed it for most of the bloodshed and destruction of the past two centuries.
Walls, like Humboldt, sees a harmonious cosmos arising from our fractured world of conflict and contradiction though a vaguely Hegelian dialectic. Yet, after two hundred years, it should be clear that the dialectic of history works primarily by one party to the dialogue murdering the other. The Vendee, the gulags, the killing fields, are but a few examples. Walls, a professor of English and expert on the American transcendentalists, also looks forward to a cosmos in which the humanities and sciences are reconciled. But our experience with epistemological monism is not encouraging. When we couple humans too closely with nature, one of two things happens. Either the humans are swallowed up in naturalism and reduced to feeding, fighting, and the third "f" or nature is swallowed up in humanism and reduced to ideas, concepts, and constructions. As in politics, the dialectic works not by synthesis but by annihilating the other side.
In Walls's subtitle the phrase "Shaping of America" refers to an aspiration that the United States become a universal, cosmopolitan nation, and presumably a model of postnational, multicultural, global citizenship. She anticipates opposition to this development but respects scant objection. After all, the beauty of a cosmos is the absence of inharmonious elements. But this is also the terror.
It is by now commonplace to observe that nature writing is very often political. Humboldt understood this, as did his admirers such as Jefferson, Emerson, and Thoreau. The same is true of writing about nature writing, for to admire a nature writer is to admire the nature of which he or she has written. Walls undoubtedly admires Humboldt and the nature he describes with the master symbol of cosmos, and this book is a learned and eloquent invitation to join her in approbation of this splendid and fascinating image. "Passage to cosmos" means conversion to Humboldt's cosmic vision. This is the title of the book because this is what the book is about. Like any nature writing, cosmos is a symbol, or image, that appeals to the imagination and in so
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doing seeks to propagate a vision. This is why nature writing is political, doctrinal. It offers a portrait of the world, not a window on the world, a representation that trains the senses in consequential ways of seeing and thinking. I have, obviously, done my best to remove some of the luster from the symbol of cosmos, and some of the glamour from Humboldt and his generation of rationalist revolutionary romantics, but have done this with reasons, not calumny. I have offered these reasons in what may strike some as pungent language, but I have done so for the simple reason that the image of cosmos is so splendid and fascinating, and Walls has rendered it with such seductive skill.--JONATHAN M. SMITH, Texas A&M University
Smith, Jonathan M.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Smith, Jonathan M. "THE PASSAGE TO COSMOS: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping
of America." The Geographical Review, vol. 100, no. 4, 2010, p. 609+. PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A240107737/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=b050f164. Accessed 19 Dec. 2017.
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Thoreauvian Modernities: Transatlantic
Conversations on an American Icon
Bob Pepperman Taylor
Environmental Values.
22.5 (Oct. 2013): p670+. From Book Review Index Plus. http://dx.doi.org/10.3197/096327113X13745164553950 COPYRIGHT 2013 The White Horse Press http://www.erica.demon.co.uk/EV.html
Full Text:
Francois Specq, Laura Dassow Walls and Michel Granger (eds.) Thoreauvian Modernities: Transatlantic Conversations on an American Icon Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2013 ISBN 978-0820344287 (HB) [pounds sterling]59.50. 296pp.
The sixteen contributors to this new collection of essays are primarily scholars of American literature (one remarkably versatile economist is included in the group). They come from Europe and the U.S. (the conference from which the volume grows was the first scholarly meeting devoted to Thoreau studies held in Europe). The broad unifying theme of the volume is the relationship of Thoreau to modernity and post-modernity. The theoretical tools used to pursue this theme are primarily (but not only) from literary- and eco-criticism. Some potential readers from other disciplines may shy away from a work with such an overwhelmingly 'literary' bent. This would be a shame and a mistake. Although there is an occasional minor lapse into disciplinary jargon, the authors are overall very self-conscious about writing clearly and for a wide audience. As with any good collection of essays, there is both unity of theme and vigorous debate. There are papers here that should (and, I certainly hope, will) be read and discussed by a wide range of Thoreau scholars well into the future.
The editors of the volume have set a perfect tone for the project. Their 'greatest hope', they write, is that rather than reaching grand theoretical conclusions or making 'definitive pronouncements about Thoreau', the book will help to keep 'this dialogue open and alive' (p.4) and enable their readers 'to see farther still' (p.17). This seems to me exactly the right goal for a collection like this: to give readers access to a set of interesting, clearly articulated, deeply informed and provocative perspectives. The editors have gathered papers of unusually high quality, and these promise to provide just the kind of service for Thoreau scholarship to which the editors aspire. The volume, in short, develops some of the fertile ground upon which a new generation of Thoreau scholarship may flourish.
The volume is divided into three sections, 'Thoreau and (Non)Modernity', 'Thoreau and Philosophy', and 'Thoreau, Language, and the Wild'. There is far too much substance in each of these sections, and each of the papers individually, for me to address in this brief review. A majority of the papers, however, wrestle in one form or another with the relationship of Thoreau's literary work to the emerging biocentric and ecological perspectives of our own time. Two classic
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studies, Lawrence Buell's The Environmental Imagination and Laura Dassow Walls' Seeing New Worlds, either explicitly or implicitly serve as springboards for many of the authors. The aim is to understand the literary forms and practices of especially Thoreau's late Journal and late nature writings, to capture Thoreau's provocative understanding of nature and the (proper) human relation to it (we should remember that these are precisely the writings frequently viewed by earlier generations as irrelevant if not outright failures). The essay by Walls herself, as well as papers by Dieter Shulz and Kristen Case and others, provide wonderfully suggestive and often original explorations of the relationship between Thoreau's literary practices (broadly construed) and a persuasive environmental or ecological ethic. It is this theme that will make many of these essays of interest not only to Thoreau scholars, but also to anyone interested in environmental values generally. Previous generations praised, and then criticised, Thoreau as a naturalist and scientist, while keeping him alive as a literary and political figure. The broad intellectual task of (much of) this volume is to weave the literary, naturalist/scientific and political themes together into a persuasive ecological perspective. Individual readers will be more or less persuaded about the success of this project, of course, but all who spend time with the book will learn much and find themselves fruitfully provoked and challenged.
Some contributions range just outside of this general theme; these are also worth the attention of Thoreau scholars. Joseph Urbas' excellent paper locates Thoreau within the 'ontological turn' of American (specifically Transcendentalist) thought in the mid-nineteenth century. Christian Maul relates Thoreau to contemporary debates in political theory. Michel Granger makes the case (it has been made before, of course) for reading Thoreau as an elitist anti-democrat, an anti- technological anti-modern, who withdrew from modern society and adopted a 'premodernist literary posture' (p.53). Randall Conrad provides a close reading of a passage in Thoreau's Journal to suggest that Thoreau's social views were anti-modern even while he cultivated a modernist literary form. Bruno Monfort explains Thoreau's use of myth within the historical context of Jacksonian Era intellectual life. These essays all touch on the question of Thoreau's relationship to modernity, even if they focus a bit less directly on questions of ecology and nature than the majority of papers.
In 1967, John Hicks published a collection of essays, Thoreau in Our Season, with the aim of helping to illuminate the relevance of Thoreau for thinking through the political upheavals of that time. The volume included statements by political figures (most importantly Martin Luther King, Jr.) as well as debates among scholars about the meaning and relevance of Thoreau's political ideas. Among the papers are some of the most critical commentaries penned since James Russell Lowell lambasted Thoreau in the nineteenth century, while other contributors were more hopeful about mining Thoreau for a defensible political radicalism. Despite the contributors' significant differences, the collection has become a classic source of materials for thinking about Thoreau as a social and political thinker. Thoreauvian Modernities promises to take its place alongside Hicks' volume as an essential collection of reflections on Thoreau's significance in helping us think through central problems of our own time. The focus is no longer on 'Resistance to Civil Government' or 'Life Without Principle', but rather the Journal and late nature writings. The concern is more literary and ecological then exclusively political. But the importance of this volume for Thoreau studies may prove to be just as great as Hicks' classic collection. There is every reason to hope and believe that this anthology will achieve the goals of its editors and contributors.
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Reference
Hicks, John (ed.) 1967. Thoreau in Our Season. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.
BOB PEPPERMAN TAYLOR
Department of Political Science University of Vermont
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Taylor, Bob Pepperman. "Thoreauvian Modernities: Transatlantic Conversations on an American
Icon." Environmental Values, vol. 22, no. 5, 2013, p. 670+. PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A446293930/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=fdd85b2e. Accessed 19 Dec. 2017.
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Emerson as a scientific thinker
Lawrence Buell
American Scientist.
91.6 (November-December 2003): p570+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2003 Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society http://www.americanscientist.org/
Full Text:
Emerson's Life in Science: The Culture of Truth. Laura Dassow Walls. x + 280 pp. Cornell University Press, 2003. $35.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) was a sage, not a scientist, but he was more keenly interested in the scientific advances of his day than is commonly realized. One of his early aspirations was to be "a naturalist," and he started his career as a lecturer-essayist by giving talks on natural science, including one focused on the chemical composition of water. Although Emerson went on to make his mark primarily in the areas of literature, religion, philosophy and social reform, he remained an eager lifelong student of both traditional and contemporary natural and social science. To date, however, this side of Emerson's thought and life has attracted only a handful of significant scholarly discussions. Emerson's Life in Science is the best: Of the spate of books on Emerson that have marked the bicentennial of his birth, this is one that will endure.
Moving in a generally but not rigidly chronological fashion through the stages of his career, Laura Dassow Walls gives a full account of Emerson's engagement with the discourses and philosophy of natural and social science from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Alexander von Humboldt to Georges Cuvier, Arnold Guyot, Charles Lyell, Robert Chambers (the author of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation) and Louis Agassiz to Charles Darwin, Asa Gray and Adolphe Quetelet--to give a partial list of the many figures and fields that attracted Emerson's interest. With several of these men he was personally acquainted; Agassiz became a close friend. All of them and many more Emerson absorbed by turns as inspiration, as provocation, as calibration, as foils.
As Emerson's Life in Science demonstrates, the range of Emerson's interests was very broad indeed, extending from astronomy, physics, geology and botany to anthropology, sociology and statistics. In characterizing these interests, Walls maintains a judicious balance between the judgmental and the appreciative. On the one hand, she freely grants Emerson's old-fashioned propensity for enlisting "science" as reinforcement of a vision of cosmos and history rendered coherent by moral law; on the other hand, she also does fuller justice than any precursor has to Emerson's more avant-garde insistence that what counts as truth must be obedient to science--and to Emerson's canniness at his best as a critical interpreter of "scientific" claims. For example, Walls judiciously builds on findings by Barbara Packer and other Emersonians that the later Emerson moved toward a more materialist theory of history as an outgrowth of his increasing interest in quantification, and in the sociological implications of the new discipline of statistics. On the other hand, Walls rightly acknowledges that Emerson facilely acquiesced to Darwinism
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by viewing natural selection as just another argument from design like those he had absorbed from Lyell and other proto-evolutionists.
In a chapter that will especially interest historians of social science, Walls accords Emerson due praise for maintaining a certain skepticism toward the racialist pseudoscience of his day (Samuel Morton's craniometry, the racial taxonomies of Samuel Knox and others), even as he sometimes made use of its vocabulary. Walls makes a case that Emerson approached the sciences very seriously, recognizing them as integral to epistemology, ethics, aesthetics and social theory. Here and elsewhere, Walls's arguments are all the more persuasive because they incorporate a candid, nuanced appraisal of Emerson's misreadings and oversimplifications along the way--as well as a recognition of Emerson's surprising influence as an inspirational thinker (mainly, it seems, as a poet of the idea of the mind's boundless powers of untapped potential) upon such Anglo- American men of science as British physicist John Tyndall.
For an Emersonian, perhaps the most compelling part of Emerson's Life in Science is its demonstration of how deeply informed by the scientific thinking of his day were many of the basic structural coordinates of Emerson's thought and writing--for example, his concept of bipolarity (more specifically, of the bipolar unity of both material and conceptual phenomena); his theory of representativeness; his strong attraction to conceiving of issues and problems of all sorts as processes versus his equally strong partiality to "gnomic" bottomline categorical pronouncements; his simultaneous commitment to individual or group distinctiveness and to the universality of the human.
The organization of Emerson's Life in Science is dictated more by these defining elements of Emerson's thought, and by Walls's desire to chart Emerson's thought as it unfolded throughout his lifetime, than by the different branches of natural science that most interested him--although there are concentrated discussions of these along the way. Conceivably this approach may strike some readers as diffuse and inefficient. But to me it seems entirely appropriate for a figure for whom what we call "science" was a vital but nonexclusive ingredient of a conception of knowledge better defined by such terms as scientia or Wissenschaft.
At all events, the author's command of her subject comes through unmistakably. No specialist in 19th-century American literature surpasses Walls in knowledge of the history of science. Emerson's Life in Science bears this out even more forcibly than her earlier book Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Science--a fine, illuminating study somewhat constrained by its concentration on the influence of a single figure, Humboldt. Anyone wishing to know more about what science meant to Emerson should start here.--Lawrence Buell, English, Harvard University
Buell, Lawrence
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Buell, Lawrence. "Emerson as a scientific thinker." American Scientist, vol. 91, no. 6, 2003, p.
570+. PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A112322530/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=ce4d3425. Accessed 19 Dec. 2017.
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Humboldt, Alexander von: The Passage
to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt
and the Shaping of America
Nikolaas A. Rupke
Biography.
33.2 (Spring 2010): p443. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2010 University of Hawaii Press http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/t-biography.aspx
Full Text:
Humboldt, Alexander von
The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America. Laura Dassow Walls. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2009. 420 pp. $35.00.
"On the way back from his historic journey of exploration of the equatorial Americas (1799-1804), Alexander von Humboldt briefly set foot on the soil of the still-young American republic. Humboldt is being rediscovered and ... honored by historians as a founding father of North American environmentalism. In her magisterial sweep across 'the cult of Humboldt that peaked in the United States in the 1850s,' Wallls shows that Humboldt's envisioning of nature stamped its mark on a distinctive American fine arts tradition that remains alive today. By recovering the excitement of Humboldtian explorations and travel experiences, Walls wins back Humboldt for the 21st century. I recommend The Passage to Cosmos as a fine piece of Humboldt scholarship, a heartfelt plea for environmental holism, and an enjoyable read."
Nikolaas A. Rupke. Science 327 (Jan. 15, 2010): 270-71.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Rupke, Nikolaas A. "Humboldt, Alexander von: The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von
Humboldt and the Shaping of America." Biography, vol. 33, no. 2, 2010, p. 443. PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A234934638/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=f71eb5ba. Accessed 19 Dec. 2017.
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'Thoreau: A Life' doesn't shy away from
the man's myriad contradictions
Danny Heitman
The Christian Science Monitor.
(July 14, 2017): Arts and Entertainment: From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 The Christian Science Publishing Society http://www.csmonitor.com/About/The-Monitor-difference
Full Text:
Byline: Danny Heitman
Two hundred years after his birth, Henry David Thoreau continues to defy easy summary.
Born in Concord, Mass. on July 12, 1817, he was skeptical of commerce, although he had advanced impressive innovations in his family's pencil-making business. Through "Walden," his celebrated chronicle of two years spent in a tiny cabin near a New England pond, Thoreau became one of the world's most famous champions of solitude, although he had many visitors at Walden and maintained an active social circle.
Detractors dismissed him as an idler, but Thoreau's restless curiosity about the natural world and his exacting attention to his writing pointed to his intense ambition. His copious documentation of local flora and fauna created a treasure trove of data for modern-day scientists studying climate change, yet Thoreau could be ambivalent about the promise of science himself. He was a famous critic of technological progress, but welcomed the convenience of the train in helping him get to the library.
Even though he sniffed at newspapers as not worth the time, Thoreau obviously read them quite a bit to keep up with the latest developments in his civic preoccupations, which included abolition. Thoreau's activism against slavery suggested a deep sense of empathy for his fellow man, but even his closest friends recalled his frequent aloofness. Ralph Waldo Emerson, an early mentor, famously offered this quote from a mutual friend: "I love Henry, but I cannot like him; and as for taking his arm, I should as soon think of taking the arm of an elm-tree."
Thoreau's myriad contradictions - his critics have sometimes called them hypocrisies - make it hard to draw a bead on him. Who was the real Thoreau, and what was he really like? Maybe the maddening multiplicity of his character fascinates us because it invites comparisons with our own inconsistencies. Thoreau might not have been any more conflicted than the next guy - only better at getting the shifting shades of his inner life on paper. His journal, which stretches to some two million words, is perhaps the most enduring legacy of a man who seemed to have no unrecorded thoughts.
None of this seems lost on Laura Dassow Walls, whose Thoreau: A Life offers a full-length biography of Walden's most famous resident. The title, which promises a life rather than the life
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of Thoreau, hints at Walls' keenness to the complexity of her subject. Thoreau, she tells readers, "has never been captured between covers; he was too quixotic, mischievous, many-sided, paradoxical. Even the friends who knew him best despaired of getting any truthful portrait on paper."
In lieu of a definitive account of America's most enigmatic man of letters, Walls offers "a reading of Thoreau's life as a writer - for, remarkably, he made of his life an extended form of composition, a kind of open, living book."
A noble aim, to be sure, though Thoreau's writing life can't neatly be separated from the many other lives he led. Some of Walls's most vivid insights, in fact, concern Thoreau's interest in science of all kinds, including mechanical engineering. Despite his embrace of simplicity, he was fascinated by machines. "It should be part of every man's education today to understand the Steam Engine," he wrote to a cousin. "What right does a man have to ride in the cars who does not know by what means he is moved?"
Walls explains how such interests informed Thoreau's work: "Science showed him how to see the Cosmos in a grain of sand or the ocean in a woodland pond.... Poetry gave him a voice to show the world why this mattered."
As at least one reviewer has noted, Walls portrays Thoreau as perhaps warmer than he really was, downplaying the considerable evidence of what a cold fish he could be.
But for those of us who first endured "Walden" as assigned reading, the sheer pleasure that Walls takes in Thoreau's writings is a timely reminder, on the bicentennial of his birth, that he's an author not simply to be respected, but enjoyed.
In a preface, Walls recalls buying a copy of "Walden" in high school, skipping a football pep rally to sample its pages. "They left me alone, and I've been stepping to the beat of that different drummer ever since."
Walls learned well from Thoreau. Her prose, like his, is briskly declarative and full of surprises. One finishes her biography eager to revisit the Thoreau books beyond his literary greatest hits. He was more than "Walden" and "Civil Disobedience," after all. "Cape Cod," "The Maine Woods," his letters and journals - they all resonate with an immediacy undimmed by the ages.
"The Thoreau I sought was not in any book, so I wrote this one," says Walls. Whether her Thoreau is my Thoreau or your Thoreau is perhaps beside the point. The best gift of "Thoreau: A Life" is its invitation to read him, or reread him, and find a Thoreau of our own.
Danny Heitman, a columnist for The Advocate newspaper in Baton Rouge, is the author of "A Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House."
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Heitman, Danny. "'Thoreau: A Life' doesn't shy away from the man's myriad contradictions."
Christian Science Monitor, 14 July 2017. PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc /A498564304/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=8dc4ebe4. Accessed 19 Dec. 2017.
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Book World: This new biography of
Henry David Thoreau is the masterpiece
he deserves
Michael Sims
The Washington Post.
(July 11, 2017): News: From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 The Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Full Text:
Byline: Michael Sims
Henry David Thoreau: A Life
By Laura Dassow Walls
University of Chicago Press. 615 pp. $35 ---
This new biography is the masterpiece that the gadfly of youthful America deserves. I have been reading Henry David Thoreau and reading about him for 40 years; I've written a book about him myself. Yet often I responded to Laura Dassow Walls' compelling narrative with mutterings such as "I never knew that" and "I hadn't thought of it that way." I found myself caught up in these New England lives all over again.
On a foundation of rigorous scholarship, Walls, a professor of English at Notre Dame, resurrects Thoreau's life with a novelist's sympathy and pacing. Most of her previous books are about either the American Transcendentalists or the explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, and her broad grasp of the era's scientific issues integrates Thoreau's dawning ecological conscience into a better-understood context than most writers on the topic can provide.
Every biographer faces the challenge of portraying and deciphering a subject's parents - their history, their mythic resonance throughout the subject's life. Walls does both with aplomb. "John Thoreau would be remembered as a quiet man," she writes of Henry's father, "unambitious and too decent to press the hard bargains needed for success in the cash-poor early republic. But time and again, he met defeat by taking a forward leap, such as opening his own store, and when it failed, trying again in Maine." Walls builds up John's character scene by scene, and when he dies, I felt deeply sad despite knowing this story well.
Henry's mother, a huge influence on her son and a woman whom many friends and neighbors memorialized, comes alive in this biography. "If few noticed John," Walls writes, "everyone
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noticed the indomitable Cynthia, who stood a head taller than her husband and was one of the most famous talkers of the day, full of wit and anecdote spiced with sarcasm, and blessed with that brisk efficiency that New Englanders call 'faculty.'" She remains a strong and witty presence throughout.
Both of Henry's smart and resourceful sisters, Helen and Sophia, influenced him - not least as informed and passionate abolitionists, encouraging his activism. But no person in his life affected him more than his handsome older brother, John Jr., whom he adored. Henry imitated him in hobbies, romance and even - after John died of tetanus in Henry's arms - in medical symptoms. John's death resulted in Henry's breakdown, out of which he climbed with difficulty.
Thoreau's era is fascinating for many reasons, including the Transcendentalist reassessments of religion and society during the 1840s, the bloody results of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the war with Mexico between 1846 and 1848, and the start of the Civil War, which was still raging when Thoreau died in 1862. Far from hiding out in the woods, Thoreau was passionately involved in these issues. His now-famous night in jail was an orchestrated public protest; he supported the violent abolitionist John Brown. Decades later, both Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. credited Thoreau's essay "Civil Disobedience" with helping inspire their own nonviolent activism.
Walls is too well versed in Thoreau's life to accept his own often contradictory pronouncements or his semi-fictional first-person narrator as necessarily factual. She teases out nuances and implications, but without unfounded speculation. And often she sums up a trait with a sly image, such as the final clause of this sentence: "Moving to Walden Pond thus had a double purpose: it offered a writer's retreat, where Thoreau could follow his calling as spiritual seeker, philosopher, and poet; and it offered a public stage on which he could dramatize his one-person revolution in consciousness, making his protest a form of performance art."
Thoreau was preoccupied with natural rhythms: day and night, summer and winter, seed and harvest. He celebrated their parade and exploited their symbolism. In Walls' later pages, as Thoreau battles tuberculosis and slips toward death at the age of 44, she aptly employs his own imagery: "As the days shortened and the leaves fell, a new Thoreau emerged: pensive and sadder, slower, deeper. As he fought to regain strength, fighting the grave, he turned to the most common activities and the most mundane needs with intentionality and deliberation. (BEGIN ITAL)Walden(END ITAL) had been his book of spring and summer. Now, willing his recovery, he was learning a mind of autumn. In these darkening and haunted pages of his Journal, Thoreau began to trace the outlines of (BEGIN ITAL)Walden(END ITAL)'s sequel: he would call it (BEGIN ITAL)Wild Fruits(END ITAL), and it would be his final harvest."
---
Sims' recent books include "Arthur and Sherlock" and "The Adventures of Henry Thoreau."
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Sims, Michael. "Book World: This new biography of Henry David Thoreau is the masterpiece he
deserves." Washington Post, 11 July 2017. PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc /A498274711/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=a642efdd. Accessed 19 Dec. 2017.
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Aeschliman, M.D. "The radical." National Review, 14 Aug. 2017, p. 38+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499864042/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=7bab490b. Accessed 19 Dec. 2017. "Walls, Laura Dassow: HENRY DAVID THOREAU." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2017. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A493329060/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=e2b4edc3. Accessed 19 Dec. 2017. "Henry David Thoreau: A Life." Publishers Weekly, 17 Apr. 2017, p. 57. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A490820820/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=aa5e08d6. Accessed 19 Dec. 2017. Brewton, Vince. "More Day to Dawn: Thoreau's Walden for the Twenty-first Century." ForeWord, Mar.-Apr. 2007. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A163247762/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=2dd1fde1. Accessed 19 Dec. 2017. "More Day to Dawn: Thoreau's Walden for the Twenty-first Century." ForeWord, 19 Aug. 2009. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A236035063/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=b81ecec1. Accessed 19 Dec. 2017. Percival, Ray. "Truth and power. (Books)." New Scientist, 5 July 2003, p. 50+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A105659189/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=5dcd9aac. Accessed 19 Dec. 2017. Burt, John. "Laura Dassow Walls, The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America." Wordsworth Circle, vol. 42, no. 4, 2011, p. 281+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A286011132/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=d35f365c. Accessed 19 Dec. 2017. Medeiros, Paul J. "Michael Granger, Francios Specq and Laura Dassow Walls, eds. Thoreauvian Modernities: Transatlantic Conversations on an American Icon." Philosophy in Review, vol. 34, no. 1-2, 2014, p. 30+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A386416139/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=84be0e12. Accessed 19 Dec. 2017. Schaumann, Caroline. "Dassow Walls, Laura. The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America." The German Quarterly, vol. 83, no. 4, 2010, p. 503+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A243634245/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=167a743b. Accessed 19 Dec. 2017. Smith, Jonathan M. "THE PASSAGE TO COSMOS: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America." The Geographical Review, vol. 100, no. 4, 2010, p. 609+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A240107737/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=b050f164. Accessed 19 Dec. 2017. Taylor, Bob Pepperman. "Thoreauvian Modernities: Transatlantic Conversations on an American Icon." Environmental Values, vol. 22, no. 5, 2013, p. 670+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A446293930/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=fdd85b2e. Accessed 19 Dec. 2017. Buell, Lawrence. "Emerson as a scientific thinker." American Scientist, vol. 91, no. 6, 2003, p. 570+. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A112322530/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=ce4d3425. Accessed 19 Dec. 2017. Rupke, Nikolaas A. "Humboldt, Alexander von: The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America." Biography, vol. 33, no. 2, 2010, p. 443. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A234934638/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=f71eb5ba. Accessed 19 Dec. 2017. Heitman, Danny. "'Thoreau: A Life' doesn't shy away from the man's myriad contradictions." Christian Science Monitor, 14 July 2017. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A498564304/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=8dc4ebe4. Accessed 19 Dec. 2017. Sims, Michael. "Book World: This new biography of Henry David Thoreau is the masterpiece he deserves." Washington Post, 11 July 2017. Book Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A498274711/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=a642efdd. Accessed 19 Dec. 2017.

• The Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/aug/10/henry-david-thoreau-a-life-by-laura-dassow-walls-review
  Word count: 1382

  Henry David Thoreau by Laura Dassow Walls review – radical, unsettling, relevant
  A superb new biography of the seer of Walden Pond reconsiders his reputation as tax-refuser, recluse, environmentalist and writer
  Transcendental reflections … Walden Pond in Concord, where Thoreau lived and wrote. Photograph: Alamy
  Transcendental reflections … Walden Pond in Concord, where Thoreau lived and wrote. Photograph: Alamy

  Sarah Bakewell

  Thu 10 Aug ‘17 02.30 EDT
  Last modified on Wed 29 Nov ‘17 04.20 EST
  Comments
  38

  In March 1845, Henry David Thoreau borrowed an axe and set off for Walden Pond, near his home in Concord, Massachusetts. He was going to build a hut, and he knew exactly where: on a spot near the water, backed by a pine grove and fronted by smaller pines and a chestnut tree. Before stopping for his first lunch break, Thoreau had cut and trimmed enough of these pines to make the house’s main timbers.

  Then he paid $4.28 to buy a shanty from a railroad worker who was moving on – the line had just been built past Walden Pond. Thoreau dismantled it and dried its planks in the sun to become the hut’s roof and sides. He laid a chimney foundation using cobblestones from the pond. When he finished the house that autumn, it had weatherproof shingles on the outside, neat plastering inside and a few carefully counted possessions: three chairs, a desk, one cup, two forks. He planted rows of potatoes, corn and peas and miles of white beans – “making the earth say beans instead of grass”, as he put it. The project had begun: Thoreau would live there, dedicating himself to the principle of simplicity. He would observe nature and write.
  In Thoreau's footsteps: my journey to Walden for the bicentennial of the original de-clutterer
  Read more

  The idea had come from his friend and neighbour, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who said a writer must have a hideaway. Walden was an obvious choice: Thoreau knew it well, and had spent lazy days in his youth drifting in boats on the pond, playing his flute. Now, he had a more serious purpose. He lived for two years in the hut, then spent a further seven working up his notes for publication. When he produced Walden, he made the earth say a lot more than “beans”. This cranky, observant, mystical, polemical, exhilarating masterpiece became a classic of 19th-century Americana, studied by schoolchildren and stuffed into pockets for journeys on the road with generations of young idealists. Through this and his essay Civil Disobedience, which urged non-violent political resistance and the principled withholding of taxes, Thoreau called on Americans to tune in, drop out and seize control.

  Walden had a rousing effect on me when I first read it. It still does, but I now find it disquieting, too. Besides nature lovers, Thoreau speaks to a spirit of refusal that runs through the modern US (and elsewhere). This spirit rejects political institutions, large-scale civic structures and tax-paying, in favour of holing up in a woodland fastness following only one’s raw sense of personal rightness. It unnerves me to read the famous line in Civil Disobedience, “That government is best which governs not at all”. It sounded good once; now it evokes the kind of thinking that considers public healthcare an evil.

  Others have raised milder doubts. After Walden came out, Thoreau’s friends and critics alike voiced surprise at the book’s portrayal of a proud recluse, when they knew that Thoreau had gone on doing regular handyman work around Concord during those years, as well as popping home once a week for dinner prepared by the family cook. Friends visited him all the time, despite his lack of a full set of forks. He was a frequent visitor to other households – so much so that Emerson’s young son Edward was surprised to learn that Thoreau had been officially resident at the pond during a time when he thought the writer was living with them.
  A replica of Thoreau’s house on Walden Pond.
  Dedicated to simplicity … a replica of Thoreau’s house on Walden Pond. Photograph: Alamy

  In her superb new biography, Laura Dassow Walls defuses such cavils with a wry, understated humour. “No other male American writer,” she says, “has been so discredited for enjoying a meal with loved ones or for not doing his own laundry.” That quiet “male” is characteristic; like Thoreau, Walls lets her sharpest observations slip through to the reader’s consciousness without touching the sides. The observations and interpretations are not hammered home, yet they are persuasive. She gives us a Thoreau who is more interesting, more intellectually curious and more subtle than I (for one) had given him credit for – despite his unsettling side, or perhaps because of it. Exploring his environmentalism and radicalism, she shows us why he might be worth reading differently in the 21st century.

  The standard biographical way-stations are all covered. Walls explores Thoreau’s childhood in Concord, his far from glittering years at Harvard, where he felt out of place (though he did master five languages and would spend his Walden evenings reading Homer in Greek), and his early attempts at schoolmastering. She then focuses on his writing life. Walls inspires us to read not just Walden, but his lectures, his essays and especially his journal.

  This downright weird journal forms a backbone to his life and in Walls’s biography is a theme in itself. He began it while under Emerson’s spell, opening it by quoting a question asked by his mentor: “What are you doing now? Do you keep a journal?” Later, his journal-keeping picked up tempo by adapting a modest volume of “Nature Notes” kept by his brother, John, who had died horribly from tetanus following a slight skin cut. Where John simply noted what he saw, Thoreau took it into a different dimension. Walls describes the uncanny feeling she had looking at this notebook, where “Henry’s raw and angular handwriting spills down the page, ripping open a vortex in John’s tidy checklist.”
  The 100 best nonfiction books: No 69 – Essays by RW Emerson (1841)
  Read more

  Later, Thoreau repurposed the journal as a professional naturalist’s log, but combined this with an attempt to capture every moment of each day’s experience, writing pencil notes almost continuously and transcribing them the next morning. (He used Thoreau family pencils, incidentally: their fortune had started from a graphite find, and he continued to work out ways of refining the pencils’ hardness.) By delicately juxtaposing her stories, Walls implies an intriguing possibility as to why this shift of style may have occurred. At around the same time, his friend Margaret Fuller had died in a shipwreck with her family, leaving Thoreau in grief. He wrote to himself: “If you can drive a nail, and have any nails to drive, drive them ... Be native to the universe.” Perhaps, faced with another loss following that of his brother, Thoreau was attempting the impossible with his journal: to capture and preserve every scrap of experienced existence before it vanished.

  Wall’s biography allows Thoreau to breathe his own air on her pages, while turning her critical gaze on each of the public roles he played as political activist, mystic, tax refuser and environmentalist. In the end, they all come together in Thoreau the writer – the person who said: “A man writing is the scribe of all nature – he is the corn and the grass and the atmosphere writing.”

  Writing, for Thoreau, meant living with full attention and awareness – living “deliberately” at every moment, in the sense of applying proper deliberation to his life. It meant, Walls says, “living so as to perceive and weigh the moral consequences of our choices”. If this isn’t a reason to see Thoreau as a man with something to say to our times, I don’t know what is.

  • Henry David Thoreau: A Life by Laura Dassow Walls (Chicago, £26.50). To order a copy, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.

• New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/12/books/review/henry-david-thoreau-a-life-laura-dassow-walls.html
  Word count: 1650

  On Thoreau’s 200th Birthday, a New Biography Pictures Him as a Man of Principle

  By FEN MONTAIGNEJULY 12, 2017
  Photo
  Henry David Thoreau in a daguerreotype taken in 1856 by Benjamin D. Maxham. Credit Benjamin D. Maxham/Thoreau Society and the Walden Woods Project

  HENRY DAVID THOREAU
  A Life
  By Laura Dassow Walls
  Illustrated. 615 pp. University of Chicago Press. $35.

  More than 50 years have passed since the publication of the last major biography of the iconic American author, naturalist, philosopher and social activist Henry David Thoreau, and this superb new book could not have come at a better time.

  The author of “Walden” — an account of living for two years, two months and two days on the shores of Walden Pond in Concord, Mass. — was a mid-19th-century visionary besotted with the wonders of the natural world. Thoreau laid the groundwork for a field that would come to be known as ecology. He was one of the first advocates for the establishment of a system of national parks. He was a passionate champion of the ethical treatment of all living things and embraced the tenets of Eastern religion, incurring the wrath of fundamentalists who accused him of blasphemy.

  And he was a man devoted to science who compiled 12 volumes of notes on the Native Americans of the northeastern United States, faithfully chronicled the dates of the flowering of plants (an important record today as the climate changes) and performed groundbreaking research into the succession of trees in burned and logged forests. Asked once why he was so eternally curious about things, Thoreau responded, “What else is there in life?”

  Laura Dassow Walls’s exuberant biography, “Henry David Thoreau: A Life,” leaves the reader in no doubt how Thoreau might react to the current administration in Washington, filled as it is with people who deny the established physical science of global warming. Thoreau would pick up his pen to skewer them mercilessly, and — practicing what he preached in his essay “Civil Disobedience” — would probably take to the streets in protest. Born 200 years ago today, Thoreau, like his fellow Transcendentalists, propounded the philosophy of living “deliberately,” by which they meant weighing the moral consequences of one’s actions. We can easily imagine, then, what Thoreau might have to say about those who worship at the altar of fossil fuels, given the indisputable evidence that their combustion is now beginning to disrupt the stability of the climate and the very rhythm of the seasons.
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  Henry David Thoreau: A Life Laura Dassow Walls

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  Reflect on Thoreau’s Vision of Walden Pond JULY 12, 2017

  Walls, the William P. and Hazel B. White professor of English at Notre Dame, paints a moving portrait of a brilliant, complex man. As she painstakingly demonstrates, Thoreau — who never married (“All nature is my bride”) and who died at the age of 44 — was anything but the recluse that some have made him out to be. He was a key member of the vibrant intellectual community of Concord and played an important public role in some of the great events of his time, notably the fight to abolish slavery.
  Photo

  One of the many pleasures of Walls’s book is how it transports us back to America in the first half of the 19th century, a time when remnants of Native American culture still existed in the Northeast, when New England’s forests were being destroyed and its rivers dammed (shall we “grub up” all our “national domains,” Thoreau asked) and when death from all manner of disease was ever-present. Born in Concord to a freethinking mother and a father who eventually became a prosperous pencil manufacturer, Thoreau entered Harvard as a retiring boy of 16 and emerged as a budding intellectual who read at least five languages. Returning to Concord, he came under the sway of the poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, the founder of Transcendentalism, who believed that each individual contained a divine spark and had a responsibility to cultivate the higher aspects of his or her nature. Emerson urged Thoreau to seek solitude and keep a journal, and so the young man did, eventually writing more than two million words in his diaries, books, reports and articles.

  He and his beloved older brother, John, founded an academy that was a notable early experiment in American education — a school that rejected corporal punishment and sought to teach not by rote but by igniting a student’s own love of learning. But it was John’s agonizing death at 26 — he contracted tetanus after slicing off a tiny piece of a finger while stropping a razor — that set Thoreau on the path that eventually led him to Walden Pond.

  In his mid-20s, Thoreau — who worked periodically as a surveyor — enjoyed limited success publishing articles, some of them based on his travels in Maine and Massachusetts. These pieces were the start of a body of work that would make Thoreau a pioneer in what today is called nature writing. But he longed to be a pioneer of a different sort, Walls writes, “not a Western one, but an inward one.”
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  And so, seeking to “simplify, simplify,” he repaired to the shores of Walden Pond, where he built a one-room structure measuring 10 feet by 15 feet by 8 feet. On July 4, 1845, just shy of his 28th birthday, Thoreau moved in, opening his journal with the line, “Yesterday I came here to live.”

  These words laid the groundwork for an American masterpiece, one in which Thoreau revels in the wonders of nature, his book echoing a theme he had sounded in an earlier work: “Surely joy is the condition of life!” Walls deftly sketches how Thoreau lived anything but a monastic life at Walden, noting that his cabin was in sight of the main road, that he entertained many guests, that trains regularly rumbled past on the new rail line to Boston and that he took dinner with his family once a week. Indeed, Walls writes, Thoreau was so much in the public eye at Walden that his retreat there “would forever remain an iconic work of performance art.”

  Thoreau continued to write and lecture after he left Walden Pond. He and his family were active in the abolitionist movement, their home a stop on the Underground Railroad. Thoreau refused to pay a poll tax and spent a night in jail because he believed the tax funded the state-sponsored violence of slavery and the mistreatment of Mexicans and Native Americans. “Let your life,” he wrote, “be a counter-friction to stop the machine.” Witnessing the widespread destruction of nature as America’s industrial economy boomed, Thoreau lamented, “Trade curses everything it handles.”

  “Walden” was published in 1854, and though it received generally favorable reviews, only about 2,000 copies of the book were sold during Thoreau’s lifetime. Indeed, he never enjoyed widespread popular or commercial success while he was alive. But he carried on, optimistic until the end, always remaining deeply rooted in Concord, Walden Pond and the surrounding woods that were not under assault. Thoreau needed nature as he did oxygen itself; in a book he was preparing for publication as he succumbed to tuberculosis, he wrote, “In wildness is the preservation of the world.”

  He died with great equanimity. When asked by an aunt if he had made peace with God, Thoreau replied, “I did not know we had ever quarreled.”

  The day before his death, Thoreau was visited by an old friend, who mentioned that he’d heard robins singing on his way there. In a whisper, Thoreau replied: “This is a beautiful world, but soon I shall see one that is fairer. I have so loved nature.”

  Fen Montaigne is the senior editor at Yale Environment 360 and the author of “Fraser’s Penguins.”

  A version of this review appears in print on July 23, 2017, on Page BR17 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: American Surveyor. Today's Paper|Subscribe
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• LA Review of Books
  https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/interviews/conversing-thoreau-interview-laura-dassow-walls/
  Word count: 2733

  Conversing with Thoreau: An Interview with Laura Dassow Walls

  Interviews Literature

  By 07/15/2017

  By Bob Blaisdell

  Laura Dassow Walls is an English professor at the University of Notre Dame and the author of The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America, Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science and Emerson’s Life in Science: The Culture of Truth. In this year that marks Thoreau’s 200th birthday, we exchanged emails about the writing of her new and first-rate biography, Henry David Thoreau: A Life.

  ¤

  BOB BLAISDELL: You write: “Thoreau was already working his way into the minds of the writers around him, already finding his biographers.” How and when did he work his way into your mind as a subject of a biography?

  LAURA DASSOW WALLS: Thoreau worked his way into my mind as an interlocutor as soon as I found Walden in the late ‘60s — a typical teenager hunting for a path of my own. Until 2009, I had absolutely no desire to do a biography of Thoreau. It came as quite a shock when I heard a voice telling me that my next book would be this biography. It was not a conscious decision, nor was it a choice: the voice simply announced it as a fact. I was relieved to learn a lot of biographers experience this — that biographies find their authors, not the other way around. I suspect that, after decades of interior conversation, I needed to break out his voice into a separate, fully externalized identity, fleshed out with his own historical life — perhaps to get on with a life of my own! Or perhaps so the two of us could finally have a real conversation, one on one.

  Which stereotype of Thoreau is most wrong? Which one is most right? Or, what does “everybody” think they know about him, but don’t really?

  Most wrong? That he was lazy. HA! He was the most driven person I know, and he worked all the time. Even in his sleep. Almost as wrong? That he was anti-technology. No, he was a professional engineer and inventor who loved to work with his hands, tinkering; he needed to understand how systems work, and that’s an engineer’s mind. Which also means understanding how systems fail: Thoreau got very, very good with that one. Most right? That he was a hermit. That’s only half wrong, because he was a hermit about half the time — he’d go hermetic part of every day. Then he’d join the family for dinner and be the life of the party. Catch him in his hermit mode, and he’d ignore you; catch him in his social mode, and he was the loveliest of human beings. His friends knew enough to let him be himself, and loved both sides of him.

  A colleague tells you she has decided she is going to write a biography of a famous literary figure. Where does she start? How did you start? When did you begin your work on this biography? How did you keep the body of the biography to 500 pages?

  Read absolutely everything your subject wrote, in chronological order; read as much as you can of what they read, also in chronological order. Respond to everything you read, in writing: what do you see happening, moment to moment, in your subject’s mind, life, heart, experience? Read everything that was written to your subject — letters are golden — or about them by anyone with first-hand knowledge. At least that’s what I did, starting in 2009. Note that I’d already written on Thoreau, but as an intellectual historian. Biography required a much more open lens, and more patience; you cannot throw anything away. The most significant things were those I’d previously ignored. As for length, at first it was huge. Getting it to 500 pages meant rethinking and rewriting, for the better part of a year, always seeking the essential. That’s more than editing; it’s conceptual work, and it takes time.

  “Outside his window he saw farmers carting peat and muck over the frozen meadows to fertilize the soil. Didn’t scholars do the same? — muck out in winter the fertile soil thrown up in summer?” Can you describe how you prepared the soil of this biography?

  By keeping a journal. First off, in conscious imitation, following his method — far in the rear and feebly by comparison, but I can vouch that it works! Second off, in writing this biography, I found that I absolutely had to keep a journal in order to keep my own identity from being swamped by his. Here’s my speculation: the more that biography, as a creative work, requires the biographer to disappear, the more the biographer needs a place to bitch and celebrate and puzzle and be very, very present in the now — that can look pretty mucky, but without muck, nothing good can grow. Also, it helped to keep track of my timeline, our historical moment today, as distinct from Thoreau’s; keeping them apart, so the timelines could be in real conversation, required some vigilance.

  There are two moments where I decided I had identified the primary theme of the biography. You write: “In life, John overshadowed his shy brother. In death, John became his brother’s muse […] John’s death became Henry Thoreau’s birth — the birth of the writer who would voice Nature to the world.”

  And you write: “From now on, Thoreau would be a writer in an entirely new sense: instead of living a little, then writing about it, his life would be one single, integrated act of composition.”

  Are either of these your primary theme?

  Both. When John died, Henry’s world broke in two — it’s impossible, I think, to understand Henry without understanding how profoundly he was traumatized by John’s death (which was gruesome). It was by inventing this new way to write — as a single, integrated act of composition — that Thoreau healed the break and became whole. In a real way, reinventing John as his Muse gave Henry his voice. As the reader discovers, Thoreau’s life broke several times, and each time, he repeats this same pattern — indeed, he makes it into his primary subject of study, becoming, in effect, a professional student of death, destruction, and regeneration. In his natural history studies, this allowed him to innovate in forest ecology and plant succession; but as his writings make clear, the material dimension — the clearcut forests, the sacrifice of the scientific specimen, even the breaking of his nation into two warring states — required literary redemption, binding it to a spiritual, or transcendent, dimension. He bound the material, and the poetic, in one integrated act.

  You say: “Walking was becoming synonymous with writing, the measure of his steps with the measure of his prose.” Has walking helped you write?

  I walk every day and cannot imagine not walking and writing together. Walking will jar loose the words that get stuck. But I don’t walk nearly as well as he did. It’s a discipline, a commitment. I’ve allowed my hours to be colonized by my job, with all the institutional “busyness” that entails — which, ironically, given my responsibilities as a teacher, writer, and thinker, militates against practicing the kind of measured, bodily thought needed to do this work really well. When I teach “Walking,” my students of course dismiss his demand that every one of us walk at least four hours a day; but otherwise, Thoreau warns, we are literally “out of our senses.” That’s quite an indictment. What would it take to return ourselves to our senses? Another way of life. And that’s Thoreau’s point: you must change your life. Unless you are satisfied to be something less than fully sane — which is, apparently, the case for most of us.

  Thoreau writes: “It is after we get home that we really go over the mountain, if ever.” How is this true in your own experience?

  This book — the experience of writing it, the challenge of living in such close neighborhood with a mind and voice as rigorous as Thoreau’s — feels to me like that mountain. Producing a book means fretting about deadlines, fussing with a software update, nailing down some bit of evidence, planning what to pack in this paragraph or that chapter. But now that I’m on my way “home,” so to speak, I see that getting over this particular mountain will take time. What did the mountain say? What did the mountain do? Yes, I’ve know this in other, more tangible experiences — including, once, on an actual mountain. I don’t think one ever finishes going over them.

  You mention that “the method Thoreau established of developing his writings by watching his words miss or hit home with a living audience stayed with him …” How have your lectures on Thoreau helped you with the writing of the biography? How much of his published writing did he read aloud? Do you read your writing aloud?

  Yes, I read everything aloud. Several times. Lectures have helped, but more with envisioning an audience for the writing, less with the writing itself — the lecture is a special genre, dependent on the ear, and cognitively much more linear. But learning to hear is essential. Toni Morrison taught me this: hearing her speak brought home to me the necessary weight and sound of written words. But the person who showed me how to write this biography is the Maine filmmaker, Huey, while we worked together on his documentary Henry David Thoreau: Surveyor of the Soul [premiering in Concord on July 15]. Huey works by creating conversations on film; he wants every word to be spoken by someone the viewer can see on camera. Nothing anonymous, no controlling voices from On High. His art lies in selecting from hundreds of hours of film and weaving together a compelling story: polyphonic, many-layered. The biographer, it seems to me, is well served by this method.

  You’re a good quoter (I made that note to myself when I read this: “On he pressed through the rocks — ‘as if sometime it had rained rocks’ — until he climbed into the skirts of cloud”; do you have any rules for yourself about quoting? Is there an American writer as quotable as Thoreau?

  There may be such an American writer — Twain, no doubt (who shares more with Thoreau than one might think), but I haven’t worked with any. Humboldt, whom I adore, is almost impossible to quote. I wanted this biography to be told as much as possible through the voices of those who inhabit its pages, so I sought every quote that gave me that flash of a real voice in a real place: letters, journals, reminiscences. My rules for quoting are to find that little pocket of words that is irreducible, and irreplaceable, and then treat it like a fine diamond. The best register across at least two or three different thematic layers.

  Your author photo shows you at Walden Pond. How often do you go there? Have you been there in all seasons?

  I have been going to Concord, and to Walden, at least once a year, usually more, since 1991. I have been there at all seasons, and some in between. I have seen it so high it flooded the paths around it; recently it’s been lower than Thoreau ever saw it, with the sandbar across his cove high and dry and wide enough to park a couple of semis — that’s really shocking. I went there after 9/11, and found a community of people who’d done the same. We gathered in silence, or talked, day after day. What makes Walden matter today are the people who go there, and all the people who someday might; it’s a place of the imagination as much as a real pond, a community as big as the world.

  Your dedication page is to Richard von Dassow. Who is he?

  He is my (late) brother. (My parents dropped the “von” during World War II.)

  You write that you wonder how he would have reacted to the atrocities and crimes committed by the government against Native Americans in the 1860s and ‘70s. Which atrocities in our time would have most angered him and roused him to civil disobedience?

  Thoreau would be shocked and grieved that the three atrocities that angered him the most are still in the American bloodstream. Slavery is legally abolished, but social and institutional racism continues: he’d stand with Black Lives Matter. The Mexican War ended with the United States claiming the northern half of Mexico; he’d be furious that the border we drew has become a wall that we now defend against Mexico, as if our act of territorial theft gave us the further right to deport a nation’s people from their historical homelands. Speaking of which, America’s treatment of our First Nations would continue to break his heart. But most atrocious of all would be the relentless attack on the planet. He envisioned and worked for the regeneration of ruined lands; that humans would willingly destroy the very conditions that make regeneration possible would be beyond his comprehension and his forgiveness.

  Do you wish Thoreau could read your book and respond to it?

  Yes. The book is, in a real way, an implicit conversation with him. His responses, in his written words, carry many surprises, but at a certain point the record is closed; the surprises are done. But the living Thoreau was a continual astonishment to his friends. He always brought them something new. I would love to hear him say, “Yes, that’s fine as far as it goes, but…” Or just contradict me outright. That would be delicious.

  If you could interview him, what would you ask him?

  He wrote so much, interrogating himself at such length repeatedly over so many years, I feel as though he anticipated my every question.

  What do you wish you knew about him that someone in his life once knew?

  How he moved, laughed, danced, the glance of his eye, the sound of his voice. Every single person who ever met him knew what none of us can never know — how he existed in the living world. Even a 5-second film clip would illuminate. Imagine reading about Charlie Chaplin without any film — whole worlds fall into the void.

  Which particular conversation of his, the contents of which haven’t come down to us, do you wish you had a transcript of?

  His friend Ellery Channing, who knew them both, said that whenever Hawthorne and Thoreau got together, their laughter “was sufficient to split a pitcher.” I dearly wish we had a transcript of that — just one single bull session would do it. We’d probably have to rewrite American literary history.

  Was it fortunate for us or for him that he didn’t marry and have children?

  For us. Thoreau would have made a good father — he was a fine surrogate father to the Emerson’s three children, who all adored him; and he would have been a fine partner, as shown by his warm relationships with family and close friends. I’m sure that Thoreau would have written brilliantly, too, but who knows? Given the gender restrictions and economic demands of the time, marriage and children might have clipped his wings. Perhaps we’d have lost the wild questing Thoreau, the haunted Thoreau, the isolated Thoreau whose perpetual sense of difference dares us to break the rules. But then I read a book like Mike Branch’s wonderful Raising Wild, and I think, No, Thoreau as married and a father would have been just fine. He would have written something else just as wild, just as strange and full of wonder.

• Boston Globe
  https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2017/07/06/thoreau-man-parts-mostly-paradoxical/PRaG5S0lNcK5s4TNevhPeM/story.html
  Word count: 1142

  book review
  Thoreau as a man of parts — mostly paradoxical
  By William H. Pritchard Globe Correspondent July 07, 2017
  lucy naland for the boston globe

  Henry David Thoreau was born 200 years ago this Wednesday, and the momentous event is marked by this ample, comprehensive, wholly sympathetic biography, the first major work of its kind in three decades. Laura Dassow Walls has no special perspective through which to consider her subject, but is concerned rather with exploring everything most salient about Thoreau’s life in an attempt to “bring Thoreau alive for our time.’’

  Although she is a professor at Notre Dame, there is nothing off-puttingly “academic” about her effort to find appropriate terms in which to engage both her subject and her readers. She knows, as have earlier biographers like Walter Harding (”The Days of Henry Thoreau: A Biography”) and Robert Richardson Jr. (”Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind”), that Thoreau was “too quixotic, mischievous, many-sided, paradoxical” to be easily caught in a book. To create her portrait Walls steeped herself in the public and private writings of Thoreau and his associates, finding that her subject “made of his life itself an extended form of composition, a kind of open, living book.’’

  When Thoreau died in 1862 at the age of only 44, victim of the tuberculosis that had struck other members of his family, his mentor and critic, Ralph Waldo Emerson, delivered the memorial address. They had been friends for 25 years, Thoreau living on two occasions in Emerson’s house. No better sentences have since been made than the ones Emerson assembled to sum up his friend’s character. Emerson playfully called him a “born protestant,” pointing out that few lives contained so many renunciations, which he then proceeded to list: “He was bred to no profession; he never married; he lived alone; he never went to church; he refused to pay a tax to the State; he ate no flesh, he drank no wine, he never knew the use of tobacco; and, though a naturalist, he used neither trap nor gun.”

  Emerson noted shrewdly that Thoreau “did not feel himself except in opposition,” a habit Emerson admitted was “a little chilling to the social affections.” One of his friends is quoted as confessing “I love Henry, but I cannot like him, and as for taking his arm, I should as soon think of taking the arm of an elm-tree.” Summing up Thoreau in a rich sentence, Emerson said: “He chose, wisely, no doubt, for himself to be the bachelor of thought and Nature.”
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  It would be folly to attempt in a short review a linear account of the main events of Thoreau’s life, from Harvard College, to the death of his brother, to pencil manufacturing, to surveying, to radical, cultural politics and abolitionism, to the patient obsessive recording of nature’s phenomena that increasingly dominated his life and would fill 13 volumes of his Journal. When an event is of notable interest, such as the wreck of the ship Elizabeth off the shores of Fire Island, N.Y., in which his friend Margaret Fuller, the American journalist and women’s rights activist, perished, the biographer provides a vivid portrayal of the disaster: “The seas broke over the ship and poured through the cabin, tearing away sails, masts, and lifeboats, sending the terrified passengers, still in their nightclothes to the deck, where they could see the shore was only three hundred yards away.”

  Although in recent years the major testament to Thoreau’s life as a writer has been the Journal, it is “Walden’’ that will keep him alive in the minds of most readers. Walls’s pages on that book employ precise and expressive language to bring out the sound of Thoreau’s voice — “bold, lyric, yearning, prophetic, confrontational.” She also reminds us humorously that Thoreau is “up on a soapbox,” concerned to make himself unmistakably heard.

  As one who has read and attempted to teach the book numerous times, I now find myself more rather than less subject to mixed feelings about the “confrontational” style of “Walden.’’ Emerson himself noted that his friend’s style often contained “a trick of his rhetoric . . . substituting for the obvious word & thought its diametrical antagonist” — “It makes me nervous & wretched to read it, with all its merits,” he said of one of Thoreau’s essays.

  Robert Frost who admired “Walden’’ called its style “conceited,” and the word is apt both in its earlier sense of witty comparisons and a more unfriendly one of affectation. A subtle book by Stanley Cavell, “The Senses of Walden,’’ admitted that from one perspective it was “an enormously long and boring book.” Many of my untutored students in their hearts have assented to this judgment; but even seasoned readers will have trouble navigating parts of the narrative that feel overextended and boastful. If there’s any fault in Walls’s account of the book, it is that she fails to imagine intelligent readers who might be unhappy with such qualities existing in a masterpiece.

  Walls’s book abounds in memorable portraits of Thoreau in relation to his American literary contemporaries. Hawthorne found him “a singular character . . . ugly as sin, long-nosed, queer mouthed, and with uncouth and somewhat rustic, although courteous manners.” When Bronson Alcott brought him together with Walt Whitman, the great men eyed each other “like two beasts, each wondering what the other would do, whether to snap or run.” For the young William Dean Howells, meeting Thoreau “was not merely a defeat of my hopes, it was a rout.” Emerson admired his friend’s “perennial threatening attitude,’’ even as he was cautioned by it.

  At one point Walls suggests that “[i]n another time and place he might have found his life’s partner with a man.” But Emerson gave a finer, more poetic characterization when he called Thoreau, in the phrase quoted earlier, “the bachelor of thought and Nature,” an icy, prickly poet of the natural world and a deeply committed social activist, “a humane being living a whole human life.’’ When near the end of his life, his orthodox Aunt Louisa asked him whether he had made his peace with God, Thoreau answered “I did not know we had ever quarreled, Aunt.”

  An earlier version of this review incorrectly said that Margaret Fuller had drowned off Cape Cod.

  HENRY DAVID THOREAU: A Life

  By Laura Dassow Walls

  University of Chicago, 615 pp.,

  illustrated, $35

  William H. Pritchard is Henry Clay Folger professor of English emeritus at Amherst College.

• Times Higher Education
  https://www.timeshighereducation.com/books/review-henry-david-thoreau-laura-dassow-walls-university-of-chicago-press
  Word count: 650

  Henry David Thoreau: A Life, by Laura Dassow Walls

  Catherine Clinton enters the beguiling lost world of a complex literary figure and seeker of truth
  August 3, 2017

  By Catherine Clinton

  Thoreau cabin

  This year’s bicentennial of Henry David Thoreau’s birth is producing a festival of reflections on this most celebrated of Americans. His platitudes adorn mugs and T-shirts; the Morgan Library & Museum in Manhattan has mounted an exhibition, This Ever New Self: Thoreau and His Journal; and now Laura Dassow Walls’ magnificent study, Henry David Thoreau: A Life, affords timely and engaging illumination of a man who has often been caricatured. She complicates an already complex figure as her vivid storytelling helps us to focus on Thoreau’s contagious spark.

  Thoreau may be a patron saint of environmental protectionism and a founding father of journal writing, yet this account contextualises his struggles, adding flesh and blood (plus humour) to the bare bones of his literary reputation. Like Philip Gura does in Man’s Better Angels: Romantic Reformers and the Coming of the Civil War (2017), Walls paints a broad canvas of political, intellectual and literary ferment, while reproducing the thrum of Thoreau’s inner rumbling. Her tender speculations provide understated insight: what might have happened to Thoreau’s love life, she asks, if he had been born a few generations later? Perhaps he has been miscast as an enemy of technology? His preternatural curiosity about engineering demonstrated that “the coupling of man and nature through machine could still be a thing of wonder”. (He also comments that man-made goods should adhere to “thorough fidelity”, making a pun on his own name.)

  Walls’ beguiling descriptions of Thoreau’s lost world prompted me to revisit Walden during a recent trip to Boston. His time in the woods taught him about himself, but also exposed him to outliers: squatters and black and Native Americans relegated to the fringes of society. Thus his communing with nature and daily self-reflections forced a new relationship with mankind, reshaping boundaries and prodding social activism. Walls suggests that Thoreau felt obliged to challenge any society that rang the bell of freedom with one hand while grasping the manacles of slavery with the other.

  After graduating from Harvard University, Thoreau returned to Concord in 1837 to discover that his own household had become “a hotbed of radical abolitionism”. From two days in jail (prompting his famed Civil Disobedience) to enthralling public lectures on John Brown, he became a spokesperson for “higher law” philosophy. He pursued his ideals and, with his mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson’s blessing, railed against injustice.

  Early in life, Thoreau’s disappointments shaped him as much as his accomplishments: his failed career as a schoolteacher, severe criticism from Margaret Fuller (his first editor) and a miserable flop when he relocated to Manhattan to try to make it in the New York publishing world. To be fair, though, this adventure did win over New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, whose patronage was critical during lean times.

  Eventually, the popularity of his writing kept his vision alive. This passionate biography serves him well, concluding that “from his grave on Author’s Ridge, Thoreau looks down upon the pond he helped create, the spring of wild life there in the midst of death – a constant new creation”. Walls’ splendid recreation of Thoreau reminds us of who this seeker was, what he has become and what he still might be.

  Catherine Clinton is the Denman chair of American history at the University of Texas at San Antonio and the author of Stepdaughters 
of History: Southern Women and the American Civil War.

  Henry David Thoreau: A Life
  By Laura Dassow Walls
  University of Chicago Press, 640pp, £26.50
  ISBN 9780226344690
  Published 24 July 2017
  Have your say

• SFGate
  http://www.sfgate.com/books/article/Henry-David-Thoreau-A-Life-by-Laura-11287604.php
  Word count: 996

  ‘Henry David Thoreau: A Life,’ by Laura Dassow Walls

  By Colin Fleming Published 4:04 pm, Thursday, July 13, 2017

  As someone who tramps about Henry David Thoreau’s Concord for many miles each year, I find myself pulled more toward the lesser-known forests where the man himself walked, rather than Walden Pond, which is where, of course, everyone goes. Laura Dassow Walls’ new biography — timed to Thoreau’s July 12 bicentennial — is akin to one of those less common ambles, an attempt to present us with a man who was only tokenly about sitting in a small wood house on a rise over a pond.

  If you’ve been to Walden Pond, and covered the ground back into town, you probably know that Thoreau’s experiment of living in the wild wasn’t really much of a wild-based experiment at all. Thoreau was someone hard to classify, which is one of Walls’ challenges as a biographer. Like his fellow Concordian — and a sort of Yoda to Thoreau’s Luke — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau was rangy and protean, one of those writers you never know how to classify. In which case, a person tends to cite that writer first and foremost as the thing they first encountered them as. With Thoreau, because of Walden, that’s usually a nature-based sage who spins philosophy that looks good on those quote-a-day calendars, which is painfully misleading.

  Ben Franklin was another American thinker/artist/quote-maker/philosopher/unofficial poet/prose blanketer who similarly ranged all over the map, but Franklin biographers always had a natural hook for readers: Franklin was hilarious. He was your rascally great uncle. Thoreau is not. A Thoreau biography feels like it is going to be serious, heavy, sententious, maybe, probably not fun but good for you: like unsweetened cranberry juice straight from the bog.

  But what do you know — Walls alleviates this problem by finding humor in some of Thoreau’s various situations, if not his actual words. Thoreau goes to Walden and learns that “never before had he been so conspicuous.” Everyone stops to stare at him. Including young women, but he liked that, and asked them to visit. Thoreau, you sly dog, you.
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  We also see Thoreau the careerist. Normally he’s cited as someone pure of heart, enmeshed with nature, solely, and all of that hippie-dippyness, but from his days at Harvard, Thoreau was trying to beat the bag out of everyone else in terms of how far he wished to go in life, the impact he wanted to have on people, the recognition he desired. He always craved new frontiers, be they wood-based, incidents of connection between two people, a tour through a forest he had visited a million times that might bring some new cluster of images and attendant thoughts to his brain. In the world of Thoreau, there are all kinds of ways to see a squirrel — and don’t underestimate the power of always have a new way of seeing — and Walls manages to be right there with him in at least a few moments of discovery.

  As Walls quotes Thoreau, he was in a quest “for wildness — a nature which I cannot put my foot through.” Nature is Thoreau’s bestie, you might say; almost all people, you could also say, are not — Thoreau thought most humans were terrible. “Base” was his word. You wonder what he’d think of them now, as the internet and digital tarring and living on the surface of life and boasting about being “chill” rather than actually passionate about anything, and existing rather than living — a crucial Thoreauian difference — rot us from the inside out and keep us perpetually prepped for the ongoing race to the bottom.

  Pleasing to me was to see Cape Cod — Thoreau’s tome about that beguiling, bewitching peninsula, a briny world unto itself — get the plaudits it deserves. Walls rightly calls it “Walden’s dark twin,” with its “rough chaos of the liminal zone,” and the stylized — but still natural — metaphor of the lighthouse keeper making sure that his domicile remains a temple of light rather than darkness. The opening of the book has one of the great horror set pieces in 19th century writing, with Thoreau describing the shipwreck of the St. John with all of the poetic intensity of Mr. Swales talking about buried bodies eroding out of the cliff of the Whitby graveyard in “Dracula.”

  This is Thoreau’s best writing, his most sonorously poetic, a mellifluous foghorn sounding for you, and your attention, in the deepest lapis lazuli of the night. As Walls writes, Thoreau relished visceral joy — the dance of nature, the reverberation of unadulterated, uncapped feeling — “making this book of darkness blaze with life.” The same phrase could double as an encapsulation for his life, and now this biography, a rectangle of radiance in your hands, with its own glow.

  Colin Fleming’s writing has appeared in the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated and many other publications. Email: books@sfchronicle.com

  Henry David Thoreau

  A Life

  By Laura Dassow Walls

  (University of Chicago Press; 615 pages; $35)

• The Economist
  https://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21726051-compelling-study-reveals-enigmatic-american-writer-worthy-reappraisal-henry
  Word count: 741

  Wild AmericanHenry David Thoreau, a new biography

  This compelling study reveals an enigmatic American writer worthy of reappraisal
  Print edition | Books and arts
  Aug 10th 2017

  Henry David Thoreau: A Life. By Laura Dassow Walls. University of Chicago Press; 613 pages; $35 and £26.50.
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  ON AN April night in 1844, a distraught Henry David Thoreau walked through the blackened waste of a forest fire he had accidentally caused only hours before. The fire, near Concord, Massachusetts, surrounded Walden Pond, about which he would write so eloquently a decade later. The woods soon recovered, but Thoreau’s reputation did not. After he died, the Atlantic published a confession from his journal and mocked him: “The icon of woodcraft, so careless he burned down the woods!…The town ne’er-do-well, off fishing when he should have been earning a living!”

  Two centuries later Thoreau’s reputation continues to be questioned. He is often derided as an ascetic crank, pond scum, or inversely, revered as a back-to-nature saint. Laura Dassow Walls’s new biography is a compelling study that dispels both these notions, revealing an enigmatic American writer worthy of reappraisal.

  Much of the animosity towards Thoreau centres on the two years he spent by Walden Pond and the book they inspired. “Walden” is seen by some as a retreat to a false wilderness, interspersed with trips to his family home for hot meals and to do his laundry. Ms Walls argues that Thoreau’s seclusion at Walden Pond should instead be viewed as an inadvertent piece of performance art. “Walden” includes some of the most influential and lyrical nature writing in America and became the foundation for a new generation of environmental thinking. Ms Walls quotes little of it, preferring to focus on the duality of Thoreau’s personality: introspective and intensely private, yet self-certain and boastful.

  While living by Walden Pond, Thoreau harboured a slave who had escaped from the South as part of the “Underground Railroad”. This act of private rebellion led to a very public one a decade later. On November 1st 1859 the professed hermit stood up in front of a crowd in the Tremont Temple in Boston to deliver a lecture in support of Captain John Brown, an abolitionist who was to be hanged for leading an armed attack in what is now West Virginia. Thoreau, thought of as a quiet philosopher, held his audience enthralled and parts of his lecture were reprinted in newspapers around the country.

  One of the pleasures of reading Ms Walls’s book is learning of Thoreau’s many-sided and relentlessly curious nature. As well as his writing and activism, he was an engineer, a surveyor, a lecturer and a meticulous naturalist. Only five weeks after the publication of Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species”, Thoreau was applying evolutionary principles to his own study. The irony of his work as a surveyor was not lost on him. By the time he died, at 44, much of Concord had changed, and the cabin at Walden Pond no longer existed. Thoreau was wary of the unhindered industrialism espoused by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson and asked why not “run the Earth off its track into a new orbit, some summer, and so change the tedious vicissitude of the seasons?” As the effects of climate change take hold, Thoreau’s warning feels prescient.

  Ms Walls’s book is a timely and revealing study of an eminent American writer and environmentalist. Thoreau’s thinking bound science, politics and nature together in the hope that both the human and the non-human could flourish. This was a novel idea at the time, and should still be heeded today.
  This article appeared in the Books and arts section of the print edition under the headline "Wild American"

• Wall Street Journal
  https://www.wsj.com/articles/thoreau-at-200-1500052255
  Word count: 2179

  Thoreau at 200
  Henry David Thoreau was a man of many passions, a chronicler of beauty in the natural world and an advocate of the enslaved and impoverished. Was his worldview a product of a systematic philosophy or was it more psychologically complicated? Randall Fuller reviews ‘Henry David Thoreau’ by Laura Dassow Walls.
  Thoreau at 200
  Photo: The Morgan Library & Museum, MA 6069. Photography by Graham S. Haber, 2010
  By Randall Fuller
  July 14, 2017 1:10 p.m. ET
  6 COMMENTS

  No other 19th-century American writer manages to annoy today’s readers like Henry David Thoreau. In recent years, prominent writers have described him as “narcissistic” and “inestimably priggish and tiresome.” Even Garrison Keillor, whose laconic humor owes a debt to Thoreau’s pungent wit, has called him “a sorehead and a loner.”

  Blame it on “Walden.” Thoreau’s masterpiece, first published in 1854, still manages to strike a nerve. Its author—the self-appointed chanticleer intent on rousing his somnambulant readers—retreated to Walden Pond in the mid-1840s, constructing a small cabin near its sandy shores and, after two years, returning with a simple message: You are wasting your life trying to be like others. In sentences honed to a lacerating edge, Thoreau sliced away at Americans’ faith in technology, their tendency toward distraction, their unthinking materialism. For more than a century and a half, the readers of “Walden” have responded defensively by accusing him of hypocrisy, misanthropy, poor social skills and general loutishness.

  In her richly rewarding “Henry David Thoreau: A Life,” Laura Dassow Walls rescues Thoreau (whose 200th birthday was on July 12) from the caricatures that have adhered to him since his most famous work was published. Ms. Walls’s Thoreau is less the irascible hermit and sanctimonious scold than a sociable, curious, passionate writer deeply involved in his time and place. We see him planting a garden as a honeymoon present for Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne, mourning the death of his beloved older brother, even falling in love. The result is a deeply humane thinker who seems more relevant than ever.
  Henry David Thoreau

  By Laura Dassow Walls

  Chicago, 615 pages, $35

  With few exceptions, Thoreau spent all of his days in Concord, Mass., a village of 4,000 souls whose citizenry included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Hawthorne and Louisa May Alcott. “Never was a poor, little country village infested with such a variety of queer, strangely dressed, oddly behaved mortals,” Hawthorne remarked of the town’s starry-eyed Transcendentalists, among whom Thoreau counted himself. Some of the most enjoyable portions of Ms. Walls’s biography are its scenes of village life, with the inevitable personal squabbles, political disputes and eccentricities.
  Thoreau at 200
  Photo: Debby Cotter Kaspari
  On Thoreau’s Animals By Danny Heitman

  In ‘Walden,’ Henry David Thoreau boasted about scrutinizing the farms around his native Concord, Mass., vicariously owning all of them through the power of imagination. The remark reveals the way he used intense observation to stake his claim on the world, inviting readers to do the same. That sensibility rests at the heart of “Thoreau’s Animals” (Yale, 256 pages, $30), an assortment of his musings on Concord’s creatures great and small.

  The possessive in the title points to Thoreau’s proprietary interest in the birds and beetles, bobcats and bees, toads and turtles and voles that came under his gaze. For Thoreau, these wonders of creation weren’t passive presences in his landscape but a living library as intimate as the books on his shelf. He watched wildlife to make it his own.

  Following a format similar to last year’s “Thoreau’s Wildflowers,” which he also produced, editor Geoff Wisner has combed through Thoreau’s two-million-word journal for material. As distilled by Mr. Wisner, some of the selections have the opaque spareness of haiku: “I hear the night-singing bird breaking out as in his dreams, made so from the first for some mysterious reason.” Others are prose equivalents of stroboscopic photographs: “As I walked through the pasture side of the hill, saw a deer mouse or two glance before me in faint galleries in the grass. They are seldom seen, for these small deer, like the larger, disappear suddenly as if they had exploded before your eyes.” Such entries remind us that Thoreau’s journal was his workshop, a place to record impressions that sometimes seem more like brainstorms than fully realized ideas. But the improvisational quality of “Thoreau’s Animals” is also its biggest charm. Thoreau was a self-styled reporter on the natural world, and his prose hums with the urgency of a scribe on deadline. Pencil illustrations by nature artist Debby Cotter Kaspari give a similar sense of immediacy. In her picture of the deer mouse, reproduced above and typical of her style, the strokes register as boldly as a seismograph’s.

  “The sound of the crickets even in the spring makes our hearts beat with its awful reproof . . . it seems irretrievably late,” Thoreau wrote in August 1853, less than a decade before his death. “The year is full of warnings of its shortness, as is life.” In this way, “Thoreau’s Animals” celebrates paying attention as humanity’s highest duty—and its deepest source of pleasure.

  —Mr. Heitman, a columnist for the Advocate in Baton Rouge, is the author of “A Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House.”

  The town’s most famous inhabitant, Emerson, was either the best or the worst thing that ever happened to Thoreau. A constant supporter of his acolyte’s literary ambitions, Emerson published Thoreau’s early work and allowed him to build his famous cabin on land that he owned near Walden Pond. He also invited Thoreau to live with his family and gave him access to his extensive library. But Emerson was a forceful personality, a cultural icon who tended to eclipse nearly everyone he met. He misguidedly encouraged Thoreau to become a poet and failed to fully grasp the younger man’s talents for natural observation. Thoreau’s life was in many ways a heroic, decadeslong struggle to both honor and escape the influence of his more famous friend.

  He did that in part by taking his mentor’s suggestions to an extreme. If Emerson began his career with a slim volume titled “Nature,” Thoreau devoted four hours a day to exploring the woods and pasture surrounding Concord. One of his gifts was to view this familiar environment as terra incognita, chronicling his daily encounters with nature as though he were Mungo Park or Alexander von Humboldt. As Ms. Walls tells it, from this habit arose one of Thoreau’s most acute insights: that to know one place exhaustively is to glimpse the cosmos.

  Today we would say that he acted locally and thought globally. Thoreau kept up with the science of his day and, in his spare time, compiled a dozen or so notebooks devoted to Native American history and lore. He invented a way to improve the production of his family’s pencil business and carefully traced Charles Darwin’s journey around the globe as recounted in the naturalist’s “Voyage of the Beagle.” He relived the battles and political debates of the ancient Greek and Roman societies (he could read both languages) and delved into Eastern philosophy and religion, eventually acquiring the most comprehensive library of non-Western thought in the nation.

  In “Walden,” Thoreau declared with Zen-like serenity that the goal of life was to inhabit the “nick of time,” or that “meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment.” But as Ms. Walls shows, this insistence upon mindfulness was largely a response to his living on the cusp of modernity. Thoreau decamped to Walden Pond just as a major revolution in industry and technology was reshaping American life, eroding a centuries-old agrarian society and ushering in a fast-paced urban world whose contours remain with us today. While Thoreau lived at the pond, a railroad between Concord and Fitchburg was built beside the pond, and its string of freight and passenger cars ruffled the water’s surface several times a day. The wilderness that Thoreau extolled in “Walden” was already a memory by the time he finished the book in 1854.

  Equally troubling for the author was the condition of the nation’s less fortunate inhabitants. Thoreau was a vocal advocate for the impoverished Irish immigrants who moved to Concord to work on the railroad, and he was an especially ardent abolitionist. He helped his radical mother and sisters shelter runaway slaves, solicited contributions for a variety of antislavery projects, and conversed with many of the leading abolitionist thinkers of the day, including Charles Sumner, Lewis Hayden and Frederick Douglass.

  These examples suggest why scholars have long divided the author into two distinct personas: the proto-environmentalist who extolled the virtues of the wild and the political dissenter whose “Civil Disobedience” (1849) served as an inspirational text for the civil-rights movement. Ms. Walls attempts to reconcile these two by suggesting that Thoreau believed “that attention to the natural environment confronted the root of all political evil.” By conceiving all living beings as interconnected, in other words, Thoreau was especially attuned to social injustice. Perhaps. But it is equally possible that, like most of us, he was a bundle of contradictions, a collection of competing impulses that responded to given situations less from philosophical systematizing than from the psychological requirements of the moment.

  If we tend to see the two years at Walden as the heart of Thoreau’s career, Ms. Walls’s biography reveals a rich and varied life after that experience had been transformed into art. The list of Thoreau’s accomplishments following his experiment in simple living is astonishing and include his becoming a world-class expert on geology and Native American ethnography, a politically engaged speaker who swayed public opinion about the abolitionist John Brown, and one of the first authors on either side of the Atlantic to adopt Darwinian ideas.

  Past scholars have tended to see the period after 1854 as a falling off—the end of Thoreau’s career as a writer. But Ms. Walls convincingly shows that Thoreau’s journals are his second great masterpiece. Here Thoreau finally overcame the influence of Emerson to become a meticulous observer of natural phenomena. He compiled information about more than 100 tree and 60 shrub species, described the height of grasses, the size of red maple leaves in May, the dates during which the “leaves of goldenrod [are] obvious.” He recorded the growth of fir trees and the leafing-out dates ofthe fever bush, waxwork, red cedar, tupelo, red currant and poison sumac. He noted the day on which “chicadees have winter ways.”

  What exactly was he up to? The simple answer is that we don’t entirely know. But the painstaking work he began in the 1850s enabled Thoreau to capture and quantify the process of growth and death in nature and to gradually become a philosopher-scientist who discerned some of nature’s interrelated processes. He made dazzling associative insights, determining before anyone else, for example, why pine trees grew where oak forests had been cut down, and vice versa. More important, and unlike nearly every other thinker of the mid-19th century, he came to believe that people were an intrinsic part of nature—neither separate nor alienated from it. Two hundred years after his birth, Thoreau remains the American author who most anticipates our present understanding of the reciprocal relationship between humans and the natural world.

  He died at age 44 of tuberculosis, leaving the voluminous project of his journals incomplete. But Emerson, always in the advance, understood their value long before scholars did. Grieving over his friend’s premature death, he compared the ambitious and dazzling intellectual acrobatics in Thoreau’s journals to a gymnast’s “leap, climb & swing.” Thoreau’s insights into the natural world, he wrote, possessed “a force unapproachable.”

  Despite the naysayers, that force is still with us. While “Walden” continues to inspire any number of contemporary movements, such as “simple living” and “minimalism,” Ms. Walls suggests how the later Thoreau might come to resonate most powerfully in the 21st century. This Thoreau abandoned much of Emerson’s Transcendentalist philosophizing and focused instead on the deep interconnections of nature and culture. He seems to have become increasingly aware that human beings had become a geological force capable of changing the natural environment by denuding forests or converting wetlands to arable property. In recent years, climate scientists have used the meticulous observations of the later journals to determine that spring arrives nearly three weeks earlier in Concord than it did 150 ago. If the Thoreau beyond “Walden” is an author for our time, then Laura Dassow Walls is his biographer.

  —Mr. Fuller is the Herman Melville Distinguished Professor of 19th-Century American Literature at the University of Kansas.

• Seattle Times
  https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/books/more-than-the-hermit-of-walden-a-new-biography-shows-us-a-fully-dimensional-thoreau/
  Word count: 726

  More than the hermit of Walden: A new biography shows us a fully dimensional Thoreau
  Originally published July 7, 2017 at 6:00 am Updated July 5, 2017 at 6:51 pm
  Mary Cauffman / The Seattle Times
  Laura Dassow Walls

  1 of 2
  Mary Cauffman / The Seattle Times

  Just in time for the 200th anniversary of Henry David Thoreau’s birth, former Seattleite Laura Dassow Walls’ 640-page biography of Thoreau revisits his works, letters, relationships, exploits, and contradictions.
  By Barbara Lloyd McMichael
  Special to The Seattle Times
  “Henry David Thoreau: A Life”
  by Laura Dassow Walls
  University of Chicago, 640 pp, $35

  This July 12 marks 200 years since the birth of one of America’s most original and provocative writers. As the bicentennial of Henry David Thoreau’s birth approaches, 21st-century publishing houses are paying extensive due to the man who, in his own lifetime, often contended with rejection and censorship from publishers, and apathy from the book-buying public.

  While each of these new books on Thoreau offers insights into various aspects of his work, it is a comprehensive new biography, from a former Seattleite who went through the University of Washington’s English program, which prevails as the must-read choice.

  “Henry David Thoreau: A Life” was written by Laura Dassow Walls, who received both bachelor’s and master’s in English from the UW before going on to earn her Ph.D. elsewhere. Today she’s on the faculty at the University of Notre Dame.
  More new books on Thoreau

  “Expect Great Things,” Kevin Dann, TarcherPerigee, 400 pp, $30

  “Thoreau’s Animals,” edited by Geoff Wisner, Yale University Press, 280 pp, $30

  “Thoreau and the Language of Trees,” by Richard Higgins, University of California Press, 248 pp, $24.95

  Selected Thoreau works

  “Walden”

  “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”

  “Civil Disobedience and Other Essays”

  “The Maine Woods”

  “Cape Cod”

  “Wild Apples”

  Walls’ 640-page biography of Thoreau revisits the works, letters, relationships, exploits, and contradictions of a man who is most often pigeonholed as the hermit philosopher of Walden Pond.

  Walls quickly dispels the incomplete caricature that has come down to us over time. By blending warm regard for her subject with intensive scholarship, she reintroduces us to a fully dimensional Thoreau, whose genius entwined keen observation of the natural world, conscientious self-education, scrupulous “self registration,” and connection to an ethical framework.

  Among his colleagues, fellow philosophers who embraced the concept (radical for its time) of Transcendentalism, Thoreau consistently pushed to expand the boundaries of their thoughts and their actions.

  As one close neighbor said of Thoreau, “It is no small boon to live in the same age with so experimental and true a Man.”

  Yet Thoreau’s professional trajectory was haphazard. After conducting his two-year experiment of living “deliberately” in the cabin he’d built at Walden Pond, he spent the next year as live-in helper to his mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson’s family while Emerson was away on a lecture tour of Europe.

  Thoreau undertook extended walkabouts around his hometown of Concord, Massachusetts, and farther out to New Hampshire, Maine, and Cape Cod, but when his own family needed assistance with their pencil-manufacturing business, he jumped into the fray, helping to develop a new pencil that became the American gold standard for that writing implement.

  And when that wasn’t enough to sustain the family, he took up surveying to bring in more money.

  Despite these fits and starts, and with the mid-19th century tumult over slavery emerging, Thoreau carved out time for a writing practice that Walls reconstructs with marvelous specificity for today’s readers.

  In this biography overall, Walls has wrangled a vast amount of material, a cast of strong characters, and an era of dramatic flux to establish a flowing and highly enjoyable narrative. Time and again she produces the judicious quotation, the discerning observation, or the apt detail. Not only does the biographer capture the breadth and depth of Thoreau’s relations and work, she leaves us tantalized, wanting more.

  For that, we can turn to Thoreau’s own remarkable writings.
  Barbara Lloyd McMichael

• Claremont
  http://www.claremont.org/crb/basicpage/thoreau-at-200/
  Word count: 1207

  Thoreau at 200

  By: Patrick J. Walsh
  November 20, 2017

  his year, the bicentennial of Henry David Thoreau’s birth, has occasioned publication of the first Thoreau biography in 50 years—Laura Dassow Walls’s Henry David Thoreau: A Life. Despite being frequently quoted, little read, and often misunderstood, Thoreau is one of America’s greatest writers. His works resist being shoehorned into contemporary academic environmentalist, naturalist, or liberal ideologies, despite his agenda-driven interpreters’ best efforts. His most famous work, Walden, is a flawless artistic composition of gracious prose, a masterpiece on its literary merits, but it is also spiritual work that illuminates reality’s divine dimension.

  A Concord, Massachusetts native, Thoreau was steeped in his mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson's Transcendentalist movement. The movement resists definition, but “transcendental” has roots in Kant and describes a movement of mind rather than soul. In Emerson’s case, this was especially true. Flannery O'Connor claimed that he never transcended the “borders of his own skull,” and added that “when Emerson said he could no longer celebrate the Lord's supper unless the bread and wine were removed, an important step in the vaporization of religion in America had taken place.”

  Emerson held sacred only his mind’s abstractions and his shifting feelings. He secularized the pulpit, exalting a new, radically individualistic spirit to take the place of religious doctrine. Emerson’s proto-hippie followers flocked to Concord to learn at their preacher’s feet, just as their descendants would flock to nearby Woodstock 100 years later. But recently married Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was renting an old manse on Emerson's property, was disgusted. In the leading essay to his short story collection, Mosses from an old Manse, Hawthorne noted, “Never was a poor country village infested with such a variety of queer, strangely dressed, oddly behaved mortals.”

  Emerson’s transcendentalism led him to reject objective truth, but Thoreau discerned truth in the world’s material reality and in mystery-infused nature. Emerson dismissed experiential theories, and hermetically sealed himself off from the complications and mysteries of human experience that Thoreau confronted.

  Thoreau willingly faced experience’s complications while living on Emerson’s land in a small house he built on July 4, 1845. His two years there were not an escape from reality but a more complete encounter with it. He challenged the emerging modern philosophies that fed man's desires while starving his spiritual and eternal needs. For Walls, Thoreau was “a pioneer, not a western one but an inward one.”

  Rather than pursuing happiness, physical comfort, and money, Thoreau turned to nature’s wildness to find a deeper joy, since “superficial wealth can buy superfluities only.” He was suspicious of liberal reformers—“the greatest bores of all”—and advocated that a man should reform himself first. In the woods he could avoid the newly-formed and rapidly proliferating humane societies and philanthropists. For Thoreau, their secular philanthropy was not Christian charity, but shallow and self-interested. His ridicule—“a man is not a good man to me because he will feed me or pulls me out of a ditch...I can find you a Newfoundland dog that will do as much”—uncovered the reformers’ selfishness: “their sympathy lies not with their fellow man but in some private ailment in themselves.”

  Neither would he make common cause with today’s environmentalists, despite Walls’s reviewers’ claims in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. “Read not the Times,” Thoreau cautioned, “Read the Eternities.” Thoreau was against the “ists” and “isms” of ideology and scorned those who, “no longer camp for a night, but have camped down on earth and forgotten heaven.”

  In Walden, Thoreau refers to himself as a poet. Deep immersion in Greco-Roman classics and 17th-century English poetry prepared him to think in terms more broadly and open-mindedly than do the ideological straitjackets imposed on thinking today. Thoreau possessed poetic knowledge disregarded in the age of Enlightenment and science.

  He was also a contemplative philosopher. In his 1948 Thoreau biography, Joseph Wood Krutch rightly discerned that “official science continued to represent in his mind the antithesis both of any genuine familiarity with even the living facts of nature and of any emotional participation in her mysteries.” In an entry about snowflakes in his journal, Thoreau records that “A divinity must have stirred within them before the crystals did thus shoot and set.” Aquinas argued that the philosopher was like the poet because both are concerned with the marvelous. Our age of “scientism”— an ideology of science which is unconcerned with discerning truth—has replaced wonder with technical expertise.

  Laura Dassow Wells’s book is less biography and more an interesting, well written narrative history of Thoreau and his times, filled with many fine anecdotes. We learn, for example, that Hawthorne's fictional faun character in the Marble Faun, may have been based on Thoreau. Her narrative follows Thoreau from childhood to Harvard, through his travels, friends, and writings, and ends at his early death from tuberculosis at age 45.

  Thoreau's message is as refreshing today as when it first appeared. He foresaw a modernity where labor banished leisure and changed human existence’s meaning. Before Max Weber, Thoreau knew that, “one does not work to live; one lives to work.” It’s only through leisure and contemplation that man escapes the consumer world’s tyranny. Thoreau recognized that the human soul needs to break the everyday life’s barriers to be lifted beyond. Heraclitus called it, “listening to the essence of things.”

  Thoreau asked the ever-present but never answered question: “What is the purpose of human existence?” Knowing absolute justice was impossible, he was no social justice warrior but a reluctant crusader, and late abolitionist. Any politically possible justice results from the soul’s inner state commanded by will, which then rebounds to society at large.

  Thoreau was also one of the earliest writers to question material progress and technology. The sounds of a locomotive near Walden woods prompted Thoreau’s reflection on technology’s power over us. It is not always clear if we’re riding technical progress’s rails or if it’s riding on us. Thoreau refused to glorify technical efficiency. He sought ends, not means: “Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which detract our attention from serious things.” When newly constructed telegraph cables connected Maine instantaneously to Texas for the first time, Thoreau wondered if “Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.” For him, the things of the spirit may be the world’s salvation if our civilization is suffocated by material forces.

  Had Thoreau lived another twenty years, he may have joined with several other Transcendentalists, including his close friend Orestes Brownson, in converting to Catholicism. Thoreau intuits a mysticism and harmony that envelopes life but which cannot be possessed. His life was one of constant expectation. I visited his grave once, made a cross on it with acorns, and said a prayer. I later realized that such a gesture was perfect for a man like Thoreau who was always searching for an intersection between nature and the timeless.

• The Nation
  https://www.thenation.com/article/thoreau-radical-seasons/
  Word count: 3281

  A Radical for All Seasons
  The surprising persistence of Henry David Thoreau.
  By Jedediah Purdy
  June 1, 2017

  Illustration by Andrea Ventura.

  Henry David Thoreau had a genius for inspiring haters. More than 160 years after Walden first appeared, that genius is undimmed. In a 2015 New Yorker essay memorably titled “Pond Scum,” Kathryn Schulz called him “narcissistic,” “pinched and selfish,” “as parochial as he was egotistical,” and an execrable writer whose best-remembered work is “unnavigable” and “fundamentally adolescent.” In his own time, satirical poets derided him as Ralph Waldo Emerson’s dwarf, a stubby-legged imitator of the more famous Transcendentalist.

  When I teach Thoreau to law students and undergraduates, they tend to agree with the “Pond Scum” assessment. They find him vain; they leap to defend the “old people” that Thoreau insisted had nothing to teach him, the shopkeepers he called “occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life.” They suspect that he failed to check his privilege by reflecting on the conditions that enabled a Harvard-educated young white man to wander freely in the woods for a while, without fearing his neighbors or the dark. I would bet that fewer Americans have read Walden than have heard that Thoreau’s mother did his laundry.

  Yet Thoreau persists. Laura Dassow Walls, who teaches English at Notre Dame, has written an engaging, sympathetic, and subtly learned biography that makes a strong case for Thoreau’s importance; she also seems a little baffled that anyone could fail to admire him. Her Thoreau was an abolitionist who brought Frederick Douglass to speak at the Concord Lyceum—a kind of community university—and participated in the Underground Railroad, to the point of risking charges of treason by helping enslaved people flee to Canada. While living at Walden, Thoreau hosted the annual festival of the Concord Female Anti-­Slavery Society, where the speakers included Lewis Hayden, who had escaped slavery in Kentucky. He was deeply interested in the indigenous cultures that remained in New England, seeking out conversation and even friendship with Native Americans, studying the Wampanoag language on his own while at Harvard, and filling more than 3,000 notebook pages with material from these investigations. He also lived in a household of strong women: His sisters set the pace in antislavery activism, and Thoreau willingly took his cues from them. He even admired and sympathized with the laborers building the railroads that would clatter along the edge of his beloved pond.

  The details are sometimes wonderful. On November 1, 1859, Thoreau defied the forces of law and order and the pleas of respectable friends by delivering a defense of John Brown to 2,500 people in Boston. “The reason why Frederick Douglass is not here,” he began, “is the reason why I am.” If every privilege check had that kind of snapping specificity and quiet moral thunder, they might be both more subversive and less disdained.
  BOOKS IN REVIEW
  Henry David Thoreau: A Life

  By Laura Dassow Walls

  Buy this book

  Thoreau’s political engagement isn’t exactly news, but Walls foregrounds it vividly to show him as part of a set of engaged communities: radical Concord, the Transcendentalist network, the abolitionist movement, and his own militant family. Far from being a hermit, the Thoreau that Walls portrays is, above all else, a social and political creature. He travels to Brooklyn for a visit with Walt Whitman (“It is as if the beasts spoke,” Thoreau wrote of Leaves of Grass) and elsewhere spends evenings with both Douglass and Brown. A key part of his early formation was working as a teaching apprentice under Orestes Brownson, the Catholic convert and proto-socialist who figures prominently in the history of American left-wing thought. He also spent time with the Alcotts and Nathaniel Hawthorne—­who, Walls tell us, used Thoreau as the basis for the title character of The Marble Faun, a moody aristocrat rumored to be descended from satyrs.

  Yet Thoreau was no aristocrat, Walls reminds us, no matter how he might have struck Hawthorne. He wasn’t a laborer’s son, as Brownson was, and he came from some means. But family members kept dying at inconvenient times, and the result was a life spent somewhere between what George Orwell called the “lower-upper-middle class” and Europe’s impoverished aristocrats. Thoreau found time for hiking trips and boating expeditions with college friends, and the family rose economically during his lifetime, becoming the leading pencil manufacturers in North America. But he always had to work for a living, including stints in his family’s pencil factory, as a schoolteacher and a surveyor, and years as a handyman, doing jobs that could be fitted in between writing and walking.

  This all remained true during the two years he lived at Walden Pond. The heart of Walls’s defense in l’affaire laundry is that even at Walden, Thoreau remained an economic member of the household, as he did all his life—contributing wages from his paid labor, building and doing repairs, and, yes, accepting meals and clean clothes in a gendered division of labor that was then universal, even in an egalitarian household like the Thoreaus’.

  But this does lead to a question: What exactly was the point of those two years, or the resulting book, subtitled “A Life in the Woods”? Thoreau moved to Walden in 1845 and built a simple cabin, much of it with materials purchased and repurposed from an Irish laborer’s shanty. The property was Emerson’s, making him Thoreau’s landlord, and it was an easy walk from town, in an area that the locals used for fishing, timber, and picnics. Nonetheless, it was enough of a change from home and town life that Thoreau hoped to find out “what are the true necessaries and means of life,” to make an “experiment” of his own existence and record the results. His experiment in material simplicity was also an exercise in shaping a style and a self.

  This is where Walls connects Tho­reau’s political commitment with the proto-­ecological nature writing for which he is best known. Walls has written three previous books on the literary and philosophical significance of 19th-century natural science—­one apiece on Thoreau, Emerson, and Alexander von Humboldt—and here she puts Thoreau’s growing recognition that everything in the world is connected at the heart of his political ethics.

  Thoreau, she argues, wrote to take the measure of his life, to consider what he needed and what needed him, where his debts and his responsibilities lay. Although this mission required an initial declaration of independence from all entanglements to clear accounts—he famously wrote that he moved to Walden on the Fourth of July—that was a step toward a deliberate and reflective re-rooting. Thoreau studied the landscape and wild things, studied his townsmen from a middle distance, and, through it all, studied himself. He concluded that none of these things could be seen whole if they were viewed in isolation from the rest.

  When the Billerica mill dam stopped up the Concord River, the latter flooded and drowned thousands of acres of meadows where Thoreau had marked the year’s calendar by the dates of the farmers’ haying. (Thoreau was hired to make an intensive study of the river, in preparation for an unsuccessful lawsuit to bring down the dam.) Ice cut from Walden—the eye of the world, he sometimes thought—was shipped to India for refrigeration, and as cultural compensation for this early example of globalization he received the Bhagavad Gita, which he saw as full of thoughts as clear as Walden’s water. Hoeing weeds from his bean field, Thoreau knocked his blade against buried arrowheads and thought of the first inhabitants of the place, still remembered in the soil. Listening to the Concord militia drill during the Mexican-American War and reading about the Fugitive Slave Act, he realized that he could not separate himself from the crimes of his country, however much he would have liked to do just that. And so the writer and naturalist, who modeled himself on what he took to be the Hindu ideal of the renunciate holy man, became an activist because he could not help being a citizen, and because as a citizen he could not help being implicated in his country’s intolerable wrongs.

  The natural world is deeply woven into Thoreau’s writing, as it was in his life. His work returns at key moments to a mysticism that is not ethereal but material. Thoreau hungered to feel his connection with the rest of the world, to know with all his being that he and the soil, the trees, and the rivers of New England were all patterned matter, shot through with the same energy of life. He seems to have felt fully alive only when joined to a world he saw in vitalist terms—a world infused with a kind of “life-energy” that gave experience its sense of impulse, form, and purpose.

  Thoreau borrowed some of this thought from Emerson, whose first major work, a short book called Nature, appeared as Thoreau was finishing college and soon obsessed the young student. Drawing on Romanticism and German Idealism, Emerson claimed that the mind and the world arose from the same ordering principle, as if each spoke the same underlying thought but in two different languages. Emerson urged his readers toward an intuitive grasp of this unity, in which self and world would reconnect. Depending on your mood, this breed of secular mysticism can be stirring or irritating; in either case, Emerson never translated it into the kind of closely documented everyday activity that became Thoreau’s métier.

  Thoreau’s transcendentalism, however, was of a more material nature. He weaved Emerson’s mysticism into his work as a naturalist, finding that one could gain access to the world’s ordering principles not in a lightning-like glimpse of the cosmos, but by attending to particulars. One could find the world’s unity in a leaf, or in the seasonal patterns that he studied with such care that, he boasted to Emerson, he could tell the calendar date within a few days by the flowers that were in bloom.

  Thoreau once spent a week carefully determining the dimensions of Walden Pond, concluding that its lines of greatest width and breadth crossed at its deepest point—a fact that, for him, ratified its symbolic role in the book by suggesting that the pond could stand for a sort of Platonic epitome of insight. His journals are so scrupulously attentive to the annual arrival and disappearance of plants that they have become a trove of data for climate scientists studying long-term ecological change. Thoreau, who was pleased to be inducted into the Boston Society of Natural History, would have been delighted; but he would also have insisted that the ultimate value of all this attentiveness was not to gain empirical knowledge of the world, but to know its inner divinity.

  Walls’s Thoreau is truly a man for all seasons, a person who, in many ways, is a 21st-century liberal’s idea of our best self: pro-­environmental, antiracist, anti-imperialist, feminist, reformist, spiritual but not religious. It is extraordinary how much there was in Thoreau to support this interpretation, and part of the power of Walls’s book is how she traces these liberal and humane preoccupations to the radicalism of his family and of Concord’s intellectual life, of which Hawthorne wrote: “Never was a poor, little country village infested with such a variety of queer, strangely dressed, oddly behaved mortals.” Like any other form of personality, radical individualism emerges from a specific social ecology—strangely, something that the ecologically minded Thoreau never really acknowledged.

  But Walls sidesteps the reasons that people have bristled at Thoreau, including those who knew him in person. She takes for granted his genius and likability; his critics, she suggests, just failed to understand him. This defense comes at some intellectual cost: By downplaying the ways that Thoreau was and is alienating, she misses the chance to consider how his appeal and his unpleasantness might be linked. For Walls, Thoreau’s ecology means solidarity: “‘Resistance,’” she writes, “means…defense of all those lives entangled with our own,” including slaves, Mexicans, Indians, and “the nonhuman world.” Well, yes. But also, no.

  It is not just that Thoreau’s supreme concern with personal liberty and conscience led him to write things like “It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself.” The pattern is more general. Thoreau resisted the familiar forms of political solidarity. Philanthropists, abolitionists, and reformers of all kinds filled him with a sort of queasy disgust, as if, by claiming the moral high ground, they were trying to get their clammy hands on his soul. Thoreau’s radicalism was always aimed at the conditions for integrity, even purity.

  He described most of the existence that Europeans had led in North America as a sort of walking death, not fundamentally because they were involved in injustice, but because they were not spiritually awake. He believed that the greatest force of social transformation was the extraordinary individual, who, by achieving a new level of moral and psychic freedom, could show others how to live. His politics were not, in the ordinary sense, political or even social, but rather moral. He often missed the importance of precisely the kinds of collaboration and mutual support that had formed him in Concord, created the Underground Railroad and the abolitionist movement, and generally provided much of the stage on which he worked out his own idiosyncratic dissent.

  Thoreau was sometimes less coherent, less in control of his own thinking, than Walls allows. She writes that his “test of human virtue was allowing all beings, human and nonhuman alike, to flourish in their own ways,” including through a kind of radical self-acceptance. But at times, when he was waxing expansive, Thoreau could sound a bit like a red-blooded American imperialist, echoing the slogan “Westward the star of empire takes its way” in his pronouncements about how, when he “beheld the Indians moving west across the stream” (the Mississippi River), “I felt that this was the heroic age itself,” and arguing “I think that the farmer displaces the Indian even because he redeems the meadow, and so makes himself stronger and in some respects more natural.” These passages all come from the late essay (and hit lecture) “Walking,” which, Walls tells us, Thoreau regarded as a key to the future work that he never produced. One wonders what we might have felt about this work if he had completed it.

  When Thoreau’s moral disapproval was most sharply focused, he could oscillate between self-righteousness and self-disgust. He wrote in Walden: “Our whole life is startlingly moral…. Listen to every zephyr for some reproof, for it is surely there.” He warned against the “reptile and sensual” spirit that lurked in every person, perhaps himself most of all: “All sensuality is one, though it takes many forms.” For Walls, these ascetic and self-repressing impulses relax and get worked into a more genial spirit in later passages. There is something to this, but the fact remains that Thoreau’s radicalism and social wariness were, at times, closely bound to misanthropy and self-righteousness, while his more world-embracing passages could also make room for the political violence and inequality that he denounced elsewhere. His writing records a painful struggle in thought and feeling more than any satisfactory resolution.

  And yet this record of struggle and self-criticism is also why Thoreau survives. The writing has the rawness of alienation, and the confusion that comes with seeking ways to affirm a world that often seems repugnant and intolerable. Thoreau’s sense that his nation had gotten under his skin and polluted him, that it had ruined even his walks in the woods, that his mind plotted rebellion even when he preferred to direct it toward sketching leaves, should hardly be strange. Who has not felt such bouts of political anger and frustration in our moment?

  Thoreau found that the political was personal, and although he hated it for that, because his first attachment was to the personal, he was too honest to pretend otherwise. So he turned it into an art, a means of making sense of his world. He wrote about being trapped in America and in a beautiful, half-ruined world whose beauty and ruin were inseparable. He wrote, too, as an awkward, often chilly person of overwhelmingly strong feelings that were sometimes opaque even to him. And he wrote about solitude, throwing his word-ropes to others again and again, because he did not want to be alone but often felt most isolated in the presence of people. “Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other’s eyes for an instant?” he asked in Walden. He died with the question unanswered.

  Late in Walden, in the chapter titled “Spring,” Thoreau goes walking during the year’s first thaw. He pauses at a bank of bare, sandy soil, ripped open by a railroad cut at the edge of Walden Pond. He watches the thawing dirt slide and roll, streaming in and out of patterns, and reflects on the ways that the human body, the waterways of the earth, and every plant and animal are just more matter forever changing shape. For a moment he is at home with himself and all of the planet’s “slimy, beastly life,” and rather than being disturbed by the railroad and the changes it has brought, he seems at peace with them. He took this ambivalent attitude toward modernity and the railroads to his deathbed, dreaming that he was the railroad cut near Walden where he’d once watched the spring come. But in his dream, the railroad was not being cut into Walden’s earth; rather, the workmen were laying down rails over his lungs.

  Was this last painful image one of despair at the coming of death and modernity? Or, as in Walden, was he expressing a strange kind of relief and acceptance? The railroad cut was an act of industrial violence against the land, but it also provoked within Thoreau a vivid experience of the oneness of all of life—the natural world and the modern, human-made one. When his mind circled back to this experience at the end of his life, this sense of oneness had not left him. He was not imagining Walden as some Ar­cadian idyll, but as part of an ever-changing and increasingly industrialized world. He was also imagining it not just as the world out there, but also inside him, touching his life and sense of wonder as well as his suffering and death. His discontent with the world in which he lived was always a form of love.
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  Jedediah PurdyJedediah Purdy teaches at Duke University and is the author, most recently, of After Nature.

• Library of America
  https://www.loa.org/news-and-views/1338-laura-dassow-walls-we-have-misread-thoreau-tragically
  Word count: 2453

  Interviews October 16, 2017

  Laura Dassow Walls: “We have misread Thoreau, tragically”

  Published to coincide with the Thoreau bicentennial this past July, Laura Dassow Walls’s new biography Henry David Thoreau: A Life (University of Chicago Press) is a galvanizing and irresistibly readable re-examination of the philosopher, social critic, and nature writer whose works still exert a clarion call on the American conscience more than 150 years after his death.

  Like the recent Morgan Library & Museum exhibition dedicated to the author, the book gives us a Thoreau living and working inside a dense network of social relations, grappling with issues that may strike twenty-first-century readers as remarkably contemporary. Of the later years of his life, as the political tensions surrounding slavery only continued to mount, she writes: “He and everyone he knew were all implicated. . . . [T]he threads of the modern global economy were spinning him and everyone around him into a dehumanizing web of destruction.”

  The biography has been generously received in the weeks since its release, with Jay Parini in the Times Literary Supplement calling it “a wonderfully brisk and satisfying portrait” and Michael Sims in the Washington Post lauding it as “the masterpiece that the gadfly of youthful America deserves.”

  William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, Laura Dassow Walls works in the field of literature and science, with a particular interest in Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the Transcendental movement in general. Below, she shares some of the thinking that went into her biography.

  Photo: © John Suiter.
  LOA: Henry David Thoreau: A Life arrives with an admiring blurb from Robert Richardson, who published his own distinguished biography of Thoreau thirty years ago. How does your book build on the work of Richardson and other predecessors?

  Walls: I see my book as complementing two other major biographies, Walter Harding’s Days of Henry Thoreau (1965) and Robert D. Richardson’s Henry David Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (1986). Harding gathered an immense amount of information and made it available in very user-friendly form; his has been the standard biography ever since, and it will long remain a valuable source. Richardson offers an intellectual history of Thoreau, based on his reading, within a biographical frame; I did something similar with my first book on Thoreau, Seeing New Worlds (1995), focusing on Thoreau and science.

  To write this comprehensive biography, I went back to the full sweep of original sources—journals, correspondence, reminiscences, newspapers, Thoreau’s published and unpublished works, and based what I wrote on what I found there. Since I’ve been working on Thoreau since the 1970s, over the years I’d already internalized the scholarly studies and earlier biographies; but the more I knew of his life—including newly discovered writings and recent scholarship—I came to feel that we needed a biography of the living Thoreau, the vital human being who was so much a part of his town, with a large and devoted circle of friends (plus a few rivals!). Given that we know a lot more about Thoreau and his time today than we did even a couple of decades ago, I saw myself bringing together a multitude of voices and orchestrating them on the page to tell his story in a fresh, new way, one that could reach a wide readership—pretty much anyone curious to know more about his life and thought.
  Henry David Thoreau photographed by Benjamin D. Maxham, 1856. (National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; public domain via Wikimedia Commons)

  LOA: The Thoreau who emerges from these pages—son, brother, very much a citizen within a community—is notably different from what you call “the iconic hermit of American lore.” Why has the hermit image been so persistent? Do we misread Thoreau as a result of its tenacity?

  Walls: I’ve come to think there are two sides to the hermit image. First, you could say he was a hermit, about half the time—that is, every day he set off alone to walk, as he said, with the serene, silent, and invisible “companion” who kept him sane. That hermit side gave us the Thoreau we love—the one who walked beyond bounds and dared us to do the same, who protected his creative solitude fiercely and rebuked anyone who intruded on it. But there was also the Thoreau who presided daily over the family’s boarding house dinner table, who was loving and funny and far too talkative, as his friends well knew, to keep to himself for very long. Good thing, too: Thoreau the great talker gave us Thoreau the great writer.

  Second, beyond the biographical reality: America, too, is split on the hermit question. Part of the American mind yearns for the brave, solitary spiritual seeker in the wilderness, and that part wants Thoreau to be, and always remain, a pure hermit; since the need seems to be perpetual, no historical reality can shake it. Perhaps it shouldn’t. On the flip side, another part of America is deeply suspicious of those loners and solitary seekers, for they tend to be disturbers of the peace: troublemakers, schismatics, separatists, self-righteous prophets. And some of Thoreau’s pages—unfortunately, most of them are in the first chapter of Walden, the easiest for a reader to find—play on this hermit-back-from-the-wilderness-with-the-Truth persona. This narrative voice, meant to provoke us, can sound terribly condescending; interestingly enough, it evolved in his lectures, and what worked well before a live audience can offend in cold hard print! Many readers, hearing that whiff of condescension, get their backs up. Then when they learn that he went home sometimes for dinner, they accuse him of hypocrisy for not being a hermit. So he’s damned no matter what.

  I do think this form of projection is interesting—it has a very long history, tracing back to newspaper publicity whipped up by his literary agent, Horace Greeley—but it’s not particularly helpful for understanding Thoreau. As Walden moves past the narrator’s early, angry phase, Thoreau reveals himself to be very much a seeker, full of questions—and in the end, full of hope for humanity. Thoreau’s closest friends were bewildered at the hostility engendered by his Walden persona, and since my biography hews to the biographical rather than the iconic truth, my Thoreau may surprise those who confuse the myth with the man. Because we have misread Thoreau, tragically in my view: he was neither saint nor hypocrite, but what he aspired to be: a whole human being. After beating up the myth for so long, we’ve lost sight of the man. I think it’s high time to change the conversation from the myth constructed by previous eras to a history that can better speak to our own.

  LOA: One of the revelations of your biography is its attention to the inhabitants of Walden Woods prior to Thoreau, when the area was a “rural slum of outcasts, drunks, and derelicts,” including a handful of former slaves. What does excavating this (almost literally) buried history add to our knowledge of Thoreau’s stay at Walden, and the book he wrote about it?

  Walls: The woods surrounding Walden Pond had for generations been a Concord commons, the place on the edge of town where you went to cut wood, fish, swim, or have a picnic; it was also the place you could make a home if you were, in essence, homeless, because no one much cared who lived out there, so long as they didn’t harm the woods. By squatting on Emerson’s land, Thoreau put himself in the same position as those “former inhabitants,” as he calls them, which is wholly in line with his intent in going to Walden: that is, to examine the economic conditions of modern life, both natural and human. Understanding the lives of those who came before him is crucially important for him; he includes them as part of the larger Concord community, the “invisible” poor whom he wants to honor and make visible. He also sees the fact that the economic system discards certain people as central to the social problem he goes to Walden to understand more deeply, and ultimately even to solve.
  Site of Thoreau’s hut at Walden Pond, Concord, Massachusetts, ca. 1908. (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division)

  LOA: Your book counters, at length and in detail, the tendency Rebecca Solnit decried in her essay “The Thoreau Problem”—namely, that of separating Thoreau’s nature writing from his social and political commitments. Why is it so crucial to show how the two are integrally interrelated?

  Walls: This is crucial because so long as we imagine these two are separate, we are living a schizophrenic life—“out of our senses,” said Thoreau in one of his best puns. To walk into “nature” (which, once your eyes are open, is everywhere) is to walk into a space free of distractions, and return to your senses—to re-inhabit your body. It’s also to engage what Thoreau called the “higher law”—the wider and deeper laws, both natural and spiritual, that subtend reality, which are corrupted by social conventions and political interests.

  So take slavery, the dominant social/political evil of Thoreau’s day: when Thoreau insisted that American freedom was a lie until the four millions of slaves were free and equal with whites, he was speaking well beyond the bounds of accepted law, opinion, and convention. We should remind ourselves that slavery was the lawful reality of the United States as mandated by the President, Congress, and the Supreme Court. It was also economic reality, the inescapable, foundational pillar of capitalism. For Thoreau to refuse to accept slavery under these conditions meant appealing beyond economic self-interest and hierarchical power relations to assert the equality of all human beings, at a time when any assertion that Blacks and Native Americans were fully human was, literally, a radical statement. Until the 1850s this was very much a fringe position, held by a few courageous women and men who were dismissed as extremists.

  Thoreau did have some good company, though: his mother and sisters were among the many women in Concord who got this grass-roots activist movement off the ground. They drew Henry into it after he returned from his 1843 sojourn in New York City. What was truly original was Thoreau’s ability to extend the ethical circle from humans to nonhumans as well—when he asks, for instance, about the environmental damage done by the dams that powered the Lowell cotton mills: “Who hears the fishes when they cry?” That is, fish, too, have the right to flourish; and so, moreover, do all living beings, including “vermin” like woodchucks and hawks, whom his neighbors shot on sight. This leads Thoreau to his ethical qualms about eating fish; it leads him to put aside hunting (in his youth, he was known as a crack shot); he eventually refuses to collect and kill specimens for scientific research, preferring to study birds and mammals in the wild, alive and going about their business.

  To lose this connection and see “two Thoreaus”—one for social justice, another for environmental preservation—is to lose the fundamental critique that joins both causes: sheer self-interest, our will to power, cannot justify taking any action that harms another living being. This is not two separate problems but one single problem, with very deep roots and cataclysmic consequences. To think otherwise is to imagine we can separate ourselves from the food we eat, the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the whole circle of creation that enables our existence. This is, literally, to be “out of our senses”—a form of insanity.

  LOA: Was it always your intention, when you embarked on this book, to underscore the continuities between Thoreau’s time and our own? Has our recent history affected your emphases in any way?
  Laura Dassow Walls. (Films by Huey)

  Walls: The continuities between Thoreau’s time and our own are a constant theme in Thoreau criticism, given that Thoreau witnessed the beginning of the industrial capitalist system that still shapes our social, political, technological, and intellectual horizons today. In that sense his critiques of environmental destruction, consumerism, factory and immigrant wage-labor, and market-based agri-business still sound fresh and penetrating.

  It’s true that much of his criticism targeted nineteenth-century engines of manifest destiny: the railroad that crossed Walden Pond on its way to conquer the West, the economic system that tied “free enterprise” to ever-greater concentrations of wealth, the Mexican War, slavery of course, the extermination of Native Americans. While to some extent these issues have faded into history, his responses still resonate today, when so much of what we struggle with is the historical legacy of the same problems. Above all, “Civil Disobedience” articulates a method of resistance to injustice that’s still profoundly effective. So I didn’t need to underscore the continuities; they came along with our shared history—the more so because he gets in our faces about them! Thoreau provokes us, and he expects us to respond not only in a dialogue with him, but also by taking responsibility for our own moral choices in life. For he urges us to remember that we do, still, have such choices, knowing how we tend to forget this and go along with the herd.

  I wrote my biography during the Obama years, so if anything it’s tinged with optimism: for all the looming challenges, during those years it did feel that the nation was on a path Thoreau would applaud. Now, of course, my book finds its audience in a very different moment, much more polarized and politicized. Thoreau declared that his purpose in going to Walden was to drill down through the “mud and slush of opinion” to “a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality.” Those are very, very powerful words today, when the very concept of truth, fact, reality, seems to be dissolving away. Indeed, our current moment feels very close to the 1850s, and that’s horrifying. I do think the parallels mean that Thoreau can provide us with some navigational aids—and perhaps a warning. But I’m also grateful that I completed my biography during a time of hope, for it carries that spirit along with it; that’s a profoundly Thoreauvian message.

• The Chronicle of Higher Education
  https://www.chronicle.com/article/Thoreau-The-Wild-Child-at-200/239981
  Word count: 2292

  Thoreau: The Wild Child at 200

  A new biography vivifies Thoreau’s restless spirit
  By John Kaag May 07, 2017

  Natalya Balnova for The Chronicle Review
  I n December 1849, Jacob Farmer, of Concord, Mass., killed a large hawk that had been preying on his hens, but rather than letting the remains fester and rot, he brought the carcass to his somewhat eccentric neighbor, Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau saw something, probably many things, in the raptor. He carried it to Samuel Cabot, curator at the Boston Society of Natural History.

  The creature, which had been regarded as a nuisance and a threat, was in fact an extreme rarity: an American goshawk, the first of its species to be identified. Compared with the partially domesticated goshawks used by European falconers for centuries, this was a genuinely wild creature, fiercely independent and militantly protective of its nest.

  Cabot skinned and stuffed it. Dissecting its muscles and bones, he preserved them in alcohol to save them for posterity. Thoreau was appalled. In Cabot’s attempt to conserve the wild animal, he had taken it apart, analyzed it, destroyed it. "Science applies a finite rule to the infinite," Thoreau lamented after returning to Concord, "its sun no longer dazzles us and fills the universe with light."

  Thoreau's principal method was to accentuate the not-so-simple act of seeing.
  This is the difficulty of studying anything even slightly feral. It’s also the challenge of writing about Thoreau, America’s most famous naturalist and original wild child. "In wildness," according to Thoreau, "is the preservation of the world." If he’s right, it is important to save his. This year, his 200th birthday, will test whether that’s possible.

  With the bicentennial of his birth comes the publishing of four new scholarly monographs on aspects of his life and thought, an orchestrated four-day gala in his hometown of Concord, dozens of careful essays and articles written in his honor, and a graceful Ken Burns video about Thoreau’s beloved Walden. Crowds of visitors — an estimated 750,000 — will make the pilgrimage to his pond this year, and the well-appointed inns of Concord have been booked for three years in advance of the birthday party in July. Many of the attendees will exchange one very hefty present: Laura Dassow Walls’s new 600-page biography, Henry David Thoreau: A Life (University of Chicago Press, July),the first comprehensive account of Thoreau to be written in nearly 30 years.

  I ’ve always been slightly suspicious of biography doorstops. Exhaustive biographies are sometimes just exhausting — very detailed postmortems rather than vivid depictions. If you’re looking for the wildness of a life, you should usually look elsewhere.

  Walls’s book, however, is touted as "the best all-around biography of Thoreau ever written," high praise from Robert Richardson, author of Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (University of California Press, 1986),a book that set the bar in Thoreau scholarship for decades. Walls tells the story not of an isolated thinker, a philosophical hermit, but rather of a vibrant life in touch with the world and replete with thought.

  Richardson’s biography concentrates on Thoreau’s reading and writing, explaining the way that a variety of literary and philosophical influences worked their way through Thoreau. In Richardson’s words, this approach gives "the illusion of interiority," but "it doesn’t really give Henry’s mind at work except in the most general ways." That sells the project short, but he is trying to make a point. Walls, by contrast, attempts to get into not only the wild, subjective inside of Thoreau, but also the complex social and political relations that shaped him.

  Her biography also comes at the right time. Today we desperately need to emulate Thoreau’s life and not just his thought. "Thoreau can make a single reader — even one suffering a life of quiet desperation — live with greater intensity," Richardson explains. "Nationally, we need his Resistance to Civil Government and we need it right now. Globally, we need Thoreau’s geomorphism, as opposed to anthropomorphism, to save the planet."

  "Laura," Richardson says, "not only describes but embodies Thoreau’s commitments and methods."

  Embodies Thoreau? For 600 pages?

  I am skeptical.

  I read the book in two sittings. It will not be used as a doorstop — ever. Richardson is right. Thoreau’s principal method in writing, in life, was to accentuate the not-so-simple act of seeing, of keeping one’s eyes open to the smallest sensorial nuance. For Thoreau, the task of staying awake to the world was a basic imperative of being alive. He writes in Walden that "we must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us even in our soundest sleep." Walls takes a similar approach in presenting the 44 years of the naturalist’s life.

  "I never intended to write biography, but in all four of my books I’ve been drawn to a biographical frame," Walls explains to me. "The thought and experience of a single person — Thoreau, Emerson, Humboldt — describes a historical arc that indexes a larger history of ideas, but makes those ideas come alive in real decisions and experiences — how ideas count." That thoughts can matter, that poetry and philosophy can enrich the experience of people and their communities — this was pivotal for Transcendentalists, like Thoreau, and the American pragmatists who inherited their intellectual project after the Civil War.

  For Thoreau’s part, Walls explains to me that his experiences in early life led him to believe that "environmental justice and social justice stem from the same ethical root. We cannot persist, as a society, in treating ‘nature’ as somehow outside ‘humanity.’ " She observes that Thoreau opens Walden, published in 1854, with the long chapter "Economy" to make us, in her words, "face how our own choices support a monstrous social and material substructure that underwrites our alienation from both nature and each other." Thoreau articulated the crisis of modernity, but also, and just as important, provided the beginnings of a solution or, at the very least, a way of working through the difficulty.

  "Live deliberately," Walls asserts, echoing Thoreau. Sounds easy, but it’s not. "Walden asks us to examine every choice we make — and to realize that we do, in fact, have choices to make! — in terms of the human/natural commons." Much of modern life seems so scripted and necessary that it is at times difficult to remember that one has a choice about exactly how to live it. Returning to this basic existential fact, according to Thoreau, involves receptivity, but also intense self-scrutiny, which stands in marked contrast to the machinations of industrial society.

  The best way to 'study' Thoreau might be to allow him to inspire us.
  James Baldwin wrote that "the purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that are hidden by the answers." A century earlier, Thoreau was already in the process of excavating unspoken but powerful assumptions and unearthing forbidden questions. "He questions his own willingness to kill specimens for science in the same moment he questions his society’s willingness to enslave African-Americans for commerce," Walls says. "He regards these both as symptoms of a deep, underlying moral horror, treating life as a means rather than an end." And it is this horror that Thoreau battled until his death, at 9 o’clock on the morning of May 6, 1862.

  B ut the horror remains. If there is a future for Thoreau studies, its vibrancy might turn on scholars’ willingness to address the dehumanizing forces that have only intensified since 1862. After a biography like Walls’s, one might wonder what remains to be said. Quite a bit, I think.

  What would Thoreau say about the rise of Donald Trump, artificial intelligence, drone warfare, the ethics of immigration, Black Lives Matter, climate change, or the persistent sense of desperation that many of us feel about the future? This is not to suggest that we use Thoreau exclusively for our own purposes, or merely understand him through the narrow lens of present concerns. Rather, I am suggesting that the best way to "study" Thoreau might be to allow him to inspire us.

  I ask Walls who is the Thoreau of the 21st century. The names come pouring out: "Bill McKibben, in environmental activism; Terry Tempest Williams, for her writing; John Lewis, for civil rights; in climate science, Michael Mann, James Hansen." Annie Dillard, who is Richardson’s wife, "embodies Thoreau for me, as an ideal realized," Walls says. Dillard’s many-sidedness is not unlike Thoreau’s.

  In Walls’s biography, a reader is intimately acquainted with Thoreau the ambivalent student, the manic writer, the avid abolitionist, the measured environmentalist, the bench scientist, the halting lecturer, the not-so-closeted mystic. After he died, this man — all of these men — lived on, and Walls’s biography allows us to see exactly how much we owe him. Actually, Walls corrects me on this point: It isn’t how much we owe him, but rather what he continues to give us while asking nothing in return.

  "Thoreau is the founder of a form of nonviolent political resistance, embodied most famously in Gandhi and King," Walls reminds me. This is perhaps Thoreau’s greatest contribution to our present American age. Civil disobedience was never meant to be restricted to world historical movements — like Indian independence and civil-rights advocacy — but to serve as a manual for everyday social resistance, inspiring average people in their daily lives to heed the call of conscience. "I have in mind someone like Walter Harding," she says, "whose Days of Henry Thoreau is the predecessor to both Bob’s biography and my own. Walter was a conscientious objector during WWII, which took immense courage." He said he found that courage in reading Thoreau, and that’s why he founded the Thoreau Society, in 1941, with the hopes of reaching a more politically engaged public.

  If Thoreau’s commitments to justice and nonviolence speak to the immediate politics of present-day America, his environmental concerns address questions that will confront the world for decades — and hopefully centuries — to come. Writing at the height of the Industrial Revolution, Thoreau identified what future scholars would term the Anthropocene, the age in which the workings of nature are inescapably influenced by the expansion of human civilization. He dedicated many years — particularly the last decade of his life — to reconceptualizing natural and human spaces into a new, interdependent category. Says Walls:

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  "What he actually learned in ‘wilderness’ was, first, that human traces were already pretty much everywhere; second, despite that, Planet Earth is itself a vast wilderness, one ‘not bound to be kind to man.’ If we don’t save the planet, the planet won’t allow us to save ourselves. That’s a truth we have yet to absorb — a truth of Thoreau’s that will dominate the 21st century. I wish we would listen to him a bit more carefully."

  The arc of Walls’s biography allows a reader to see how Thoreau’s experiences, commitments, and writings might be interpreted, and how they work, in the 21st century. She doesn’t tell us how to apply his life to our own, but her attention to detail and her lively prose make it nearly impossible not to.

  But it is not in the grand trajectory, but rather in the faint, often-overlooked moments, of his life that a reader can truly see something transcendently wild in Thoreau. Walls, scouring his published and unpublished writings, gives her readers hundreds of these fleeting chances to catch sight of a beautifully untamed but distinctly American existence.

  Henry’s grandfather Jean Thoreau was a privateer in the Revolution. Thoreau was a schoolteacher who refused to flog his pupils. John Thoreau died of lockjaw in his brother Henry’s arms. Thoreau wasn’t alone at Walden, but rather was surrounded by a dilapidated village of immigrants and freed slaves. Thoreau was part of the Underground Railroad. He helped raise the Emerson children. His famous neck beard was grown to counteract consumption. He couldn’t stand the sight of a butchered moose. He carried Whitman’s Leaves of Grass — a book that was virtually banned — around Concord like the Bible. In the depths of a fatal illness, he testified that "it was as good to be sick as it is to be well." At the end of his life, Thoreau remained fascinated by a frozen fish he’d once witnessed come back from the dead.

  These vignettes cut into the smooth recasting of Thoreau. Walls comes as close as any biographer has to giving us the wild Thoreau — disorienting and bewildering. Could a life — my life, yours, anyone’s — be this intense? The stories she gives us are colorful but true. Making permanent or exact "sense" of them would be impossible. And that is for the best.

  A goshawk cannot be understood, much less reassembled, on the dissection table.

  John Kaag is a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. His book American Philosophy: A Love Story was published last year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

  A version of this article appeared in the May 12, 2017 issue.

• Chicago Tribune
  http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/books/ct-thoreau-200-birthday-laura-dassow-walls-books-0709-20170706-story.html
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  Happy 200th Henry David Thoreau: New bio reframes naturalist, activist and philosopher
  'Thoreau'
  Chicago Tribune
  Tom Montgomery FateChicago Tribune

  July 12 marks the bicentennial of the birth of writer-philosopher Henry David Thoreau, who is best known for his nature memoir, "Walden:Or, Life in the Woods," which stems from the two years (1845-47) he lived in a 10-by-15-foot cabin on the banks of Walden Pond near Concord, Mass. Over the years many biographers have tried to capture the life of Thoreau, each through a different lens of understanding: Thoreau as the transcendentalist, who, with Ralph Waldo Emerson and others, introduced a new philosophical movement. Or Thoreau as the naturalist, who carefully studied and recorded the ecology of the Concord area. Or Thoreau as the political activist, who spent a night in jail rather than pay his poll tax, and who fervently defended abolitionist John Brown. Or Thoreau as the low-tech poet-monk who sought to live a less material and more deliberate life amid the fevered industrialization of the mid-19th century.

  The remarkable thing about Laura Dassow Walls' new biography, "Henry David Thoreau: A Life," is that she manages to weave these different yet related strands of Thoreau's character into one clear and engaging story, which is readable and well-researched. Walls believes that we have invented two central perceptions of Thoreau since his death: "both of them hermits, but radically at odds with each other. One speaks for nature, the other for social justice." But, she argues, "the historical Thoreau was no hermit, and … his social activism and his defense of nature sprang from the same roots: he found society in nature, and nature he found everywhere, including the town center and the human heart."

  Walls unpacks the most common misunderstanding about Thoreau at Walden Pond. While he found intellectual and spiritual solitude there, he was not isolated from people and did not live in a remote "wilderness."

  "Had he ever imagined retirement to the pond would offer an escape from society," Walls writes, "Thoreau soon learned it was the opposite: never before had he been so conspicuous." He lived near the main road to the pond and next to a favorite fishing hole ("Pouts Nest"). "In his solitude, Thoreau became a sort of magnet" for townspeople and travelers and hunters and fishermen and picnickers. His family visited him at the cabin Saturday afternoons, and he returned home for a hot meal on Sundays. The so-called wilderness around him was largely a woodlot and was being cut down for fuel. The Fitchburg Railroad — 100 yards from his cabin — had just been constructed, so 15 or 20 trains roared by each day.

  Walls divides the chronology of Thoreau's life into three sections: "The Making of Thoreau" (childhood through his years at Harvard and the tragic death of his brother, John); "The Making of 'Walden'" (the background, writing and publication of the book); and "Successions" (post-"Walden" writings and activism through his death from tuberculosis at 44). Each section includes extensive research from a wide range of sources, which is likely what allowed Walls to construct a rounder and more complex Thoreau than other biographies have achieved. Walls' Thoreau is a heady and pensive philosopher-naturalist and writer. But he is also a skilled surveyor and pencil maker who often puts his writing projects aside to earn money to help support his family. He is courageous and quirky, a skilled and respected public orator, but at times socially awkward.

  Walls deftly weaves Thoreau's life into the history of 19th century New England. Thoreau's literary and political world included Emerson, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Louisa May Alcott, Horace Greeley and James Russell Lowell, to name a few. Interspersed with Thoreau's saunters through the Concord woods and hikes up Mount Katahdin are the personal and social impacts of the The Fugitive Slave Law (1850) and the Dred Scott decision (1857) and Charles Darwin's publishing of "The Origin of Species" (1860).

  Such people and events dramatically affected Thoreau's life and worldview, and Walls includes them as a means of revealing that Thoreau was a solitary nature-loving artist and an engaged social activist. As an artist, he desperately longs to see the world; as an activist he longs to save it. As an artist, he sometimes looks inward at the "I," the self; as an activist, he often looks outward with the "Eye," at the world. But, as Walls reveals, these two ways of seeing, of responding to nature and society, rarely contradict or compete in Thoreau. Instead, they powerfully converge, which is perhaps what makes him so unique, and why his writing and influence have endured for two centuries.

  Tom Montgomery Fate is the author of "Cabin Fever: A Suburban Father's Search for the Wild."
  'Henry David Thoreau: A Life'

  By Laura Dassow Walls, University of Chicago, 640 pages, $35

• Harper's
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  Word count: 3653

  Into the Wild
  Henry David Thoreau as prophet, naturalist, and stealth comedian

  By James Marcus
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  Henry David Thoreau: A Life, by Laura Dassow Walls. The University of Chicago Press. 640 pages. $35.

  Given his role as the patron saint of environmentalism, it seems fitting that Henry David Thoreau’s life should be permeated with recycling. The cabin he built on Walden Pond was constructed in part from the boards of an Irish laborer’s shanty, whose owner had worked on the railroad that ran through the woods just a few hundred yards away. After Thoreau returned to civilization, the roof of his rotting cabin was used to cover a pigsty. As for the jail cell where he spent a single night — according to local lore, when the building was demolished in the 1880s, some of the rubble was used to buttress the cemetery where Thoreau’s body had been buried. There he lies beneath a chaste headstone reading henry. If you stand before his grave, which is often surmounted by a small copse of pens and pencils stuck in the ground by admirers, you can just make out the glinting surface of the pond that he surveyed for the cemetery’s founders.

  Thoreau’s Cabin, by Richard Bosman. Courtesy the artist and Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York City

  This endless recurrence is partly due to the modest size of Concord, Massachusetts, where Thoreau spent most of his days, and to the cheeseparing glory of Yankee thrift. But it also operates as a metaphysical principle in both his life and art, which Laura Dassow Walls chronicles so effectively in her new biography. In fact, she begins Henry David Thoreau: A Life with her subject’s discovery of what he described in his journal as a “most perfect arrowhead, as sharp as if just from the hands of the Indian fabricator.” He had been fooling around on the banks of the Concord River when this fortuitous relic came to hand. Yet it induced a kind of time-traveling euphoria in the young Thoreau, and gave him a hint of the stereoscopic vision that would eventually allow him to fuse, in Walls’s words, “present and past, white and Indian, civil and wild, man and nature.”

  In the fall of 1837, however, Thoreau wasn’t there yet. At age twenty, he had just graduated from Harvard, where the students, enraged by the college’s fierce disciplinary system, had staged an Animal House–style insurrection during his freshman year. Despite his later enthusiasm for civil disobedience, Thoreau couldn’t afford to engage in such antics: he was a scholarship student, often mocked for his green homespun coat and floppy handshake. He kept his nose clean, worked hard, and graduated nineteenth in a class of forty-one. He also received a $25 prize and a speaking slot at commencement — thanks to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who lobbied the school’s nitpicking president, Josiah Quincy, on Thoreau’s behalf.

  This intersection with Emerson was arguably the formative event of Thoreau’s life. The previous year, Emerson had published Nature, his transcendentalist call to arms, which Thoreau repeatedly borrowed from the library and viewed with almost scriptural reverence. Emerson, who was then thirty-four, was not the inventor of transcendentalism. Indeed, this kitchen-sink philosophy — which the scholar Perry Miller once described as a reaction to the “emotional starvation” of New England life, and especially to the chilly rationalism of the Unitarian Church — was too vague to have a single inventor. Nobody, however, had articulated its intuitive style and hostility toward received wisdom with even a fraction of Emerson’s aphoristic verve. Every human being, he insisted in Nature, should enjoy an “original relation to the universe.” This required a Zen-like attentiveness to the natural world — which was itself a crude approximation of the spiritual world that lay behind it, accessible only in glimpses, during those moments when the soul functioned as a sort of ecstatic antenna. The movement also spurred at least some of its foot soldiers to reconceive American society from the ground up, attending to such issues as slavery, temperance, public education, prison reform, and poverty.

  For the young Thoreau, who had spent his childhood outdoors, a sunburned investigator of the hills, forests, and meadows around Concord, Emerson’s ideas must have been electrifying. What’s more, his hero actually lived in the same town, and had spent much of his youth roaming the identical landscape. When Thoreau returned to Concord after graduation, the two quickly grew close. “I delight much in my young friend,” Emerson wrote in his journal, “who seems to have as free & erect a mind as any I have ever met.”

  It was, not surprisingly, a master-and-disciple relationship at the start. Indeed, Thoreau’s friends — and, eventually, his enemies — often teased him for imitating his guru’s tone, mannerisms, and lacquered prose. (“With my eyes shut I shouldn’t know them apart,” James Russell Lowell snidely noted in 1838.) The resemblance was certainly not physical. Emerson was tall and imposing, his height emphasized by his swanlike neck, while Thoreau was a stumpy and somewhat homely figure, with what his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne described as a “long-nosed, queer-mouthed” face. The two must have made quite a Mutt-and-Jeff pair during their lengthy rambles around Concord. Yet their rapport was intense from the start, and its gradual unraveling, as Thoreau found his voice and Emerson lost his, would cause both parties no end of pain and confusion. In a sense, and despite Thoreau’s warm relations with such members of the transcendentalist posse as Bronson Alcott, Emerson was his primary relationship — his Significant Other.

  When he first got to know Emerson, Thoreau had recently washed out as a schoolteacher, since he was reluctant to cane the pupils. He and his brother, John, briefly ran a school of their own out of the family home, and he sought teaching gigs elsewhere in New England. But little came of these efforts, and by 1838 Thoreau had more or less commenced his career as a pantheistic slacker: the happy hermit of Walden Pond, reclining on a bed of pine needles and communing with the woodchucks when things got dull.

  Except he was nothing of the kind. Thoreau was one of the most industrious creatures on earth, whose journals alone — some 2 million words in fourteen volumes — would have intimidated such bulk producers as Charles Dickens or, in our own day, Joyce Carol Oates. Nor were his labors limited to the printed page. He was a skilled surveyor, carpenter, and naturalist, and even one of those small-business owners we have been taught to regard as the quintessential Americans, having run the family’s pencil factory after his father died in 1859.

  All of which is to say that the biographer of Thoreau must do double duty, telling the man’s story while simultaneously hacking away at the underbrush of apocrypha and plain old misunderstanding that had already begun to spring up during his short lifetime. His first modern biographer, Walter Harding, spent much of The Days of Henry Thoreau (1965) correcting the record, and Robert Sullivan took the revisionist mission to new heights in his lively The Thoreau You Don’t Know (2009). Walls, by dint of sheer expansiveness and archival diligence, tells us even more about the Thoreau we don’t know and the world that produced him.

  I didn’t know, for example, the extent to which Concord, which both Thoreau and Emerson tend to depict as an Edenic wonderland, was more like a factory town — a miniature Akron-on-the-Musketaquid. Not only had most of the village been denuded of trees, but during Thoreau’s childhood, he was able, as Walls writes, to

  peer behind the stacks of raw cowhides into the stinking tannery vats, and feel the scorching heat of the foundry fire, where men cast molten brass into bells for horse-drawn sleighs and fittings for the clockmakers across the street.

  By the mid-1820s, the author notes, the town fathers had actually engaged in a bit of urban renewal, tearing down the ramshackle shops and factories and replacing them with handsome Federal-style structures. In other words, they turned Concord into the picturesque New England village we now imagine it to have been in the first place. Still, Thoreau’s subsequent retreat from civilization makes a little more sense when you factor in his youthful exposure to the sights, sounds, and fantastically pungent smells of the Industrial Revolution.

  Walls is similarly informative when it comes to her subject’s interlude as a literary man-on-the-make in New York City. Emerson’s brother William was persuaded to hire Thoreau as a tutor for his young son in 1843. Reluctantly prying himself loose from Concord, Thoreau took up residence on Staten Island and made regular trips to Manhattan, whose crowds and commotion he soon grew to despise: “It is a thousand times meaner than I could have imagined.” Picturing the rustic Thoreau on Broadway is pure surrealism. What staggers the mind, however, is the idea of him begging for work from publishers and editors, many of whom suggested that he write for nothing, just like their modern-day counterparts. Others, unwilling to bet on an obscurity, simply sent him packing. (The latter group included the founders of this magazine: In a letter to his mother, Thoreau lamented that he had “conversed with the Harpers — to see if they might not find me useful to them — but they say that they are making fifty thousand dollars annually, and their motto is to let well enough alone.”)

  By December, having obtained ten dollars from Emerson for some material he contributed to The Dial, Thoreau packed his bags and fled. En route, he made a brief stop at Brook Farm, the utopian retreat founded two years earlier by a group of transcendentalists. The place was already down on its luck, and one of its residents, Hawthorne, would ridicule its idealistic vapors just a decade later in The Blithedale Romance. At the time, though, it was sufficiently solvent that Thoreau gave some thought to staying there. In retrospect, this seems almost as insane as the idea of him settling down in New York. It’s not that he would have objected to the hard labor or the simple accommodations — those were right up his alley. No, the problem was that by temperament (and by adherence to the transcendentalist credo of self-reliance), he simply didn’t play well with others. He had become an ardent and somewhat cranky recluse, who, as he later wrote, “suspected any enterprise in which two were engaged together.”

  Such suspicion may well have been related to Thoreau’s stunted erotic life. His first recorded passion, memorialized in a swoony love poem shortly after he graduated from college, was for an eleven-year-old boy. As if recognizing the societal peril of these feelings, he swiftly transferred his affections to the boy’s older sister, and later developed a giant (and no doubt platonic) crush on Emerson’s wife, Lidian. Walls argues that Thoreau was most likely gay: “In another place and time, he might have found his life’s partner with a man.” Yet he remained a perpetual bachelor, being afflicted with what Emerson once described as the “porcupine impossibility of contact” with others. Such people are solitaries to their very fingertips. If Thoreau were to establish a retreat, it would be a retreat of one — which is exactly what he did.

  Thoreau’s sojourn at Walden Pond, which lasted two years, two months, and two days, has produced almost as much confusion as Walden, in which those two years, two months, and two days were refashioned into a vest-pocket version of eternity. The idea, of course, was to withdraw into the wilderness, to see precisely what a human being could live without — an exercise in subtraction. In that sense, Thoreau was putting into practice the anchoritic ideals that his high-minded contemporaries had merely preached. But he was well aware that Walden was an artificial wilderness. His cabin, after all, stood just a mile from the village, with trains running through the woods up to twenty times a day, and was built on land owned by (who else?) Emerson. Indeed, Thoreau needed this nearby outpost of civilization, with its creature comforts and flabby conformity, for his own retreat to make any sense. He had to see precisely what he had given up — and so did everybody else. Thoreau’s very visible hermitage was, in Walls’s apt phrase, a “public stage on which he could dramatize his one-person revolution in consciousness, making his protest a form of performance art.”

  Performance is very much at the heart of the book. Although it is justly celebrated for its ecstatic descriptions of the natural world, Walden is also a work of droll, dry, borderline-undetectable comedy. Take the opening pages, in which the author apologizes for the crime of writing a book about himself:

  We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience.

  The book is studded with such deadpan amusement, not to mention comic comparisons. At one point, in a move that strikes me as proto–Borscht Belt, the author compares a noisy bird to Paganini. For that matter, many parts of Walden — and specifically, the anal-retentive budgetary calculations sprinkled throughout the first chapter — are meant to parody the self-help manuals that were so popular in Thoreau’s day. (He owned at least four of them, including Jane West’s Letters Addressed to a Young Man, on His First Entrance into Life and an early, aggressively inspirational biography of Benjamin Franklin.)1

  1 The Thoreau-disliking faction almost always characterizes him as a humorless scold. So when Kathryn Schulz assembled an indictment for The New Yorker, with the amusing title “Pond Scum,” she played that card at once: “Thoreau regarded humor as he regarded salt, and did without.” Schulz’s piece includes its share of zingers, but it’s often carping and clueless. Even Thoreau’s participation in the Underground Railroad is discounted as a libertarian ploy, as if he were some kind of cross-dressing Ayn Rand, rather than as an act of conscience. As for the Thoreau-hating faction, readers are advised to check out the relevant chapter in Alfred Kazin’s An American Procession, in which he is depicted as a navel-gazing monster and general pox on American literature. Perhaps Kazin came to resent that his own greatest hit, A Walker in the City, was often described as an urban updating of Thoreau’s “Walking,” an ambulatory essay published by The Atlantic Monthly in 1862.

  I’m not suggesting that Walden is some kind of stand-up routine. The author’s tone is not only earnest but prophetic as he lights into the tepid behavior of the tribe, with its bad habit of contracting “into a nutshell of civility, or dilating into an atmosphere of thin and vaporous generosity.” The reader must at any cost shed the straitjacket of received wisdom: “Why level downward to our dullest perceptions always, and praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.” The idea was to see the world anew at every moment. To share this sensation with his readers was Thoreau’s great mission, and the vehicle for accomplishing it was his brilliant, thorny, paradoxical, sometimes exasperated prose. Needless to say, the author’s impatience with his contemporaries can wear thin. You begin to feel a sneaking sympathy for the quietly desperate populace of Concord, whose comfy chairs and ready fellowship Thoreau both despises and, at least once in a while, envies. Inveighing against the simple virtues of community, he mentions only in passing that he entertained as many as thirty people at a time at his sylvan digs.

  But Walden, with its unfolding cycle of the seasons and nonstop rumination on soul and society, remains a mighty masterpiece. Moving beyond his apothegmatic itch and constructing a large-scale narrative, Thoreau finally outstripped the looming figure of Emerson, even as their intimacy waned. He also found a kind of immortality in the woods, an immortality based not on Christian precepts but on the sheer recurrence of nature, its ferocity and self-replenishing power. Hence his story of the “strong and beautiful bug” emerging from the wood of an old table decades after the egg had been deposited in the original tree:

  Who does not feel his faith in a resurrection and immortality strengthened by hearing of this? Who knows what beautiful and winged life, whose egg has been buried for ages under many concentric layers of woodenness in the dead dry life of society, deposited at first in the alburnum of the green and living tree, which has been gradually converted into the semblance of its well-seasoned tomb, — heard perchance gnawing out now for years by the astonished family of man, as they sat round the festive board, — may unexpectedly come forth from amidst society’s most trivial and handselled furniture, to enjoy its perfect summer life at last!

  Thoreau returned to civilization — meaning Emerson’s house, where he stayed for ten months, and then the attic room in his family’s boardinghouse, where he lived for the rest of his life — in 1847. He spent the next seven years revising and expanding and polishing Walden, which was published in 1854, not long after almost the entire print run of his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, boomeranged back to the author. (“I have now a library of nearly 900 volumes,” he noted, “over 700 of which I wrote myself.”) Thoreau was no less tireless when it came to his journal, whose purpose had changed dramatically. What was once a vast reservoir of raw material now became a fluent, freestanding work of art, and a way to notate the universe in something approaching real time.

  Yet in the midst of this amazing fecundity, he found space for something else: political engagement. I mentioned earlier that transcendentalism overlapped in certain ways with the great reform movements of the era. Some of its participants, expecting a revolution in human consciousness, saw little reason to wade into the political trenches. Emerson in particular viewed the reformers through satirical lenses. “What a fertility of projects for the salvation of the world!” he wrote. But Thoreau, whom we might have expected to wash his hands of any such crusading, moved in the opposite direction.

  I’m not talking about the night he spent in jail, in July 1846, after he refused to pay his poll tax. That sounds like a lark — or, more to the point, like Walden with room service. I’m talking about Thoreau’s unstinting support of John Brown, and his heated abolitionist addresses, and his work on behalf of the Underground Railroad — a risky business shared with his entire family, since their home sheltered a good many fugitive slaves en route to Canada. I’m talking too about “Civil Disobedience,” the foundational essay in which Thoreau worked out his tangled feelings about resisting state-sponsored evil. In doing so, Walls argues, he “pinpointed the error foisted onto every Harvard student and spread by all of Concord’s elites: that the ultimate social good was a smooth-running social machine.” Again, the greatest and most toxic error was to take the glad-handing reassurances of society at face value. A responsible citizen (Thoreau was finally using the word as an honorific) looked at them anew. And when those reassurances turned out to be camouflage for social crimes, resistance was not an option but an obligation.

  Thoreau, however, had seen what happened to John Brown in the wake of the Harpers Ferry debacle. He considered Brown a sacrificial victim — quite literally a latter-day Christ — yet he recognized that some resistance would have to be quiet, incremental, like sprinkling gravel in the engine block. As he declared in “Civil Disobedience”:

  If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.

  At this moment of civic cataclysm, Thoreau’s advice, and his example, should give us heart. “Let your life be a counter friction” — those are fine words, and really, they apply to everything he wrote, including the deceptive idyll of Walden. He was never not pushing back against a society that he viewed as too cowed or complacent to do the right thing. He was never not urging his readers to open their eyes to what was before them — even when those things were invisible. In his final days, before he succumbed to tuberculosis in 1862, Thoreau stopped writing in his journal. In the very last sentence, committed to the page on November 3, 1861, he noted that the marks left in gravel by a storm allowed the observer to figure out which direction the gale had been blowing. “Thus each wind is self-registering,” he wrote. Things unseen, things vanished, were bound to leave their traces. Two hundred years after Thoreau’s birth, we are registering him still.

• Enviroment and Society Portal
  http://www.environmentandsociety.org/mml/roundtable-review-passage-cosmos-laura-dassow-walls
  Word count: 269

  Roundtable Review of The Passage to Cosmos by Laura Dassow Walls
  from Multimedia Library Collection: Books & Profiles

  Hamblin, Jacob D. (ed.), Roundtable Review of The Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America by Laura Dassow Walls. H-Environment Roundtable Reviews 2, no. 4 (2012) www.h‐net.org/~environ/roundtables/env‐roundtable‐2‐4.pdf (link is external).

  What does it mean to describe a worldview as Humboldtean? Prussian aristocrat Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) traveled extensively, gathered specimens, produced drawings, formulated grand geophysical theories, and never shied away from describing Earth’s processes on a global scale. While his brother Wilhelm lent his name to “Humboldtean education,” Alexander is associated with “Humboldtean science.” In The Passage to Cosmos, literary scholar Laura Dassow Walls shows how Humboldt the explorer produced his unitary worldview. Throughout the book is a sense that the division between the humanistic and scientific traditions is itself an unfortunate historical development. It seems appropriate that the book itself easily crosses over stiff academic boundaries, not just between science and the humanities, but also between literary criticism and history.

  (Text adapted from Jacob D. Hamblin's introduction to the Roundtable Review.)

  H-Environment's Roundtable Book Reviews provide multiple perspectives on books and allow the authors the opportunity to respond. This unique dialogue can be a valuable insight into recent scholarship.

  Copyright © 2012 H-Net: Humanities and Social Sciences Online. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, H-Environment, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online.

• The Star
  https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/reviews/2017/07/07/thoreau-200-years-later-he-still-influences-environmentalists-everywhere.html
  Word count: 835

  Thoreau: 200 years later, he still influences environmentalists everywhere

  New biography of Henry David Thoreau by Laura Dassow Walls explores the writer's life and influence on his 200th birthday
  By Bruce WhitemanSpecial to the Star
  Fri., July 7, 2017
  Henry David Thoreau - Laura Dassow Walls

  A friend of Henry David Thoreau, the author of Walden: Or Life In The Woods (1854) and still today a god among environmentalists everywhere, once remarked that if you “[Gave] him sunshine, and a handful of nuts,” he was a happy man.

  Thoreau, who died of tuberculosis at only forty-four, spent much of his short life outdoors: tramping through woods, climbing mountains, and boating on rivers, all the while keeping detailed and extensive notes in his journals about trees, plants, wildlife, and (increasingly as he aged) the deleterious effects of humanity on the natural world. He lived to see his beloved Walden Pond, where he spent two years, two months, and two days living in the small house that he built on his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson’s property, suddenly bristling with No Trespassing signs.

  This year we celebrate Thoreau’s 200th birthday (he was born on July 12, 1817), and to mark that anniversary the University of Chicago Press has released Laura Dassow Walls’s keenly awaited biography of the writer. It is much the longest biography to date, and while not exhaustive (I was left wondering, for example, whether Thoreau ever read his contemporaries Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick or Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush), it does paint a detailed portrait of Thoreau and is exceedingly well written, even poetic in places. Walls, who teaches English at the University of Notre-Dame, has made excellent use of the various Thoreau archives and is patently a master of the Thoreau literature, which is extensive.

  Thoreau almost slavishly followed Voltaire’s comic advice to cultivate his garden. He rarely left his hometown of Concord, Mass., and then mostly for nature trips, some of them rather hard-going for him and his various companions. He visited a foreign country only once, when he went briefly to Quebec in 1850. (“What I got by going to Canada was a cold,” he wrote). He seems to have heard an opera only on one occasion (it was Bellini’s I Puritani), and to have noticed a work of art only once as well (it was a genre picture by Frederic Church). If he heard any classical music in Boston or New York, where he lived briefly in the early 1840s, Walls doesn’t mention it. He knew Hawthorne and Emerson and Bronson Alcott (whose daughter wrote Little Women), but his reading seems not to have included much fiction.

  Thoreau’s abiding passions were to be exercised in nature. A fish or an apple tree or the hiss of a snake could send him into ecstasy. At the age of forty he was still collecting birds’ nests like an eight-year-old boy and smelling up his parents’ house (where he lived much of his adult life) with specimens he brought home from walks. He was an amateur naturalist in the very best sense, and had much to teach the professionals of his day. The great scientist Louis Agassiz (whose racial theories later brought him into disrepute) and the famous Harvard botanist Asa Gray both benefitted from Thoreau’s conversation and his remarkable gifts of observation. He was a great friend to those of his acquaintance who could keep up with him, though one complained that “If you flinched at anything he had no more use for you.”

  Walden has never been out of print, and it continues to bewitch readers who admire its philosophy and its practical advice for living à la campagne and on one’s own. (The cabin on Walden Pond was not, however, exactly isolated. Thoreau could walk to town and had frequent guests. He even took his laundry home for washing.) His essay “Civil Disobedience” inspired Tolstoy and Gandhi and Martin Luther King, among many others, and he stood up for John Brown, after the failed attack on Harpers Ferry in 1859, when many people in America were calling for Brown’s execution.

  Indeed, Thoreau was a lifelong abolitionist, and he took pleasure from Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) primarily because he deemed it slavery’s coup de grâce. (All humans are equal if all humans are in a common line of descent.) Thoreau saw the beginnings of the Civil War, but it is a terrible irony of fate that he did not live long enough to see passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. His influence has never waned, and many of his then original views (on the importance of First Nations culture, for example, or on the establishment of wilderness preserves) are now common coin and help to sustain his memory. Walls’s biography will do the same.

  Bruce Whiteman is a Toronto poet and reviewer.

• Dallas News
  https://www.dallasnews.com/arts/books/2017/07/07/thoreau-laura-dassow-walls-review
  Word count: 934

  For his 200th birthday, Thoreau gets a biography worth waiting for
  Filed under Books at Jul 7
  Written by
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  Is there a more misunderstood American icon than Henry David Thoreau? You know, that lazy moocher . . . that nagging narcissist . . . that insolvent proto-hippie grooving away his days on the shores of Walden Pond?

  Thankfully, on the bicentennial of Thoreau's July 12, 1817 birth comes the first major biography of him in half a century. And it is well worth the wait, deftly debunking the half-truths and slanders above and capturing Thoreau's many Thoreaus in one book: not just the bard and botanist of Walden but the rebellious abolitionist, the intrepid traveler, the stern critic of mainstream Christianity, the skilled, hardworking teacher, engineer and surveyor and the passionate pantheist at home in the bosom of nature.

  Of course nobody, not even a genius, springs from nowhere. Announcing that "no American writer is more place-centered than Thoreau," Laura Dassow Walls begins by establishing Thoreau's milieu in every sense of the word, zooming back in time to the geological prehistory of New England and Thoreau's home of Concord, Mass.

  From the geological she moves to the social and political, sketching Concord society and the precarious finances of Thoreau's father, John. In 1822, when Henry was 5, a family outing brought him a first glimpse of Walden Pond: "That woodland vision for a long time made the drapery of my dreams," he wrote.

  Walls also takes a keen interest in the ways Thoreau's young mind was shaped by his years at Harvard, where he was classmates with the poet James Russell Lowell and Richard Henry Dana, later the author of Two Years Before the Mast. In a talk Thoreau gave to his class of young men graduating during the Panic of 1837, he questioned the morality of an increasingly commerce-driven society, arguing that the endless scramble for money and possessions destroys true freedom — a belief that would underpin his masterpiece, Walden.
  Henry David Thoreau (Library of Congress)
  Henry David Thoreau
  (Library of Congress)

  Walls wants readers to know much more about Thoreau than Walden, but her long chapter on his two years, two months and two days in the woods is a standout of the book. She notes that Thoreau's growing sense of himself as an independent voice against the crowd — "a majority of one," he would write — owed much to the influence of courageous abolitionists like Wendell Phillips. When Thoreau began building his cabin in March 1845, during the fierce debate over the annexation of Texas, the shame of slavery and its corrosive effect on the human spirit were much on his mind.

  As for that famous cabin, anyone thinking Thoreau was a slacker should read Walls' painstaking account of his labors in digging the cellar, putting in the floor, building the chimney, plastering the interior and more. Total cost in those pre-Home Depot days: $28.12 ½. "Thoreau wanted a house to embody a new self, so that building that house meant building that self, literally from the ground up," Walls writes. Once complete, it served as base camp for one of the great adventures in American literature.

  No biography of Thoreau is complete without his older, more famous friend and fellow Concordian, Ralph Waldo Emerson, though Walls cannot fully explain the tensions that troubled the relationship. Emerson generously helped Thoreau, hiring him as a gardener and tutor and giving him freedom to develop his literary skills. Early on, he touted Thoreau's poetry and published him in his ill-fated magazine, The Dial. Thoreau built his cabin on land Emerson owned near Walden Pond.

  But Thoreau chafed under critics' accusations that he was merely an Emerson imitator, and Emerson's cold dismissal of Thoreau's first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, tormented Thoreau until his death from tuberculosis in 1862. (The failure of the book, which Walls regards as "a flawed masterpiece," also left Thoreau deep in debt.) The two never fully trusted each other again, but, Walls writes, "the one thing neither could bear was leaving the other alone."
   A replica of Henry David Thoreau's one-room cabin at Walden Pond in Concord, Mass.(The Associated Press /2003 File Photo)
  A replica of Henry David Thoreau's one-room cabin at Walden Pond in Concord, Mass.
  (The Associated Press /2003 File Photo)

  One of the greatest images from Walden perfectly marries the tactile and the philosophical, the earthy and the spiritual:

  "Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downwards through the mud and slush of opinion and tradition, and pride and prejudice, appearance and delusion . . . till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place which we can call reality and say, 'This is and no mistake.' "

  That is precisely what Walls does with Thoreau, digging through the accreted layers of nonsense to find the fascinating man below. She has rendered a great service to American letters.

  Writer Chris Tucker teaches politics and history in Richland College's Emeritus program.
  Henry David Thoreau

  A Life

  Laura Dassow Walls

  (University of Chicago Press, $35)
   Walden Pond  in May. (Elise Amendola/AP)
  Walden Pond in May.
  (Elise Amendola/AP)
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