The iDeal Reader

Henry David Thoreau, ‘‘The
Battle of the Ants’’

© The McGraw−Hill
Companies, 2000

Henry David Thoreau

(1817–1862), transcendentalist essayist, naturalist, editor, and social critic, was born David Henry Thoreau in Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau graduated from
Harvard University and taught briefly at a school in Concord but resigned rather than be expected to strike his students. He ran his own school from 1838 to 1841, teaching Latin, Greek, and science.
In 1938 Thoreau also began lecturing, which he continued intermittently, often emphasizing his strong opposition to slavery, but his message was not always well received. Thoreau began his lifelong friendship with Ralph Waldo Emerson when he tutored Emerson’s brother William in 1843 on Staten Island, boarding with Emerson and his wife. He helped Emerson edit the Transcendentalist magazine The Dial. Thoreau kept a journal at Emerson’s urging, which aided him in his writing.
He took a canoe trip with his brother John during the first two weeks of September 1839, which experience he transformed into a volume of poems and essays entitled A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers (1849). While he published 1000 copies himself, only about 300 sold.
On July 4, 1845 Thoreau moved into a cabin on the shores of Walden Pond, on land belonging to Emerson, about two miles from Concord, and lived there alone for over two years. Thoreau condensed this outdoor life as if it were a single year in his classic Walden: Or, Life in the Woods
(1854), in which he describes his lifestyle as experimental, emphasizing meditative awakening, the result of a wish “to live deliberately,” to shed materialism and to cultivate self-reliance.
In July 1846 Thoreau spent a night in the Concord jail because he refused to pay a local poll tax in protest against the Mexican War and America’s persistence in