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He grew up in Concord, a transcendental sports center near Boston, and his father was a small business owner. I graduated from Harvard University at the age of 20. I used to be a teacher and engaged in all kinds of manual labor. I met Emerson when I was a student. Under the influence of Emerson, I read the works of Coleridge, Carlyle and others, studied the philosophy of the East, and thought with the spirit of "self-help" advocated by Emerson, forming a set of independent opinions.
Thoreau's works are all based on his experiences in nature. 1839, he and his brother rowed and drifted on the Merrimack River, and wrote A Week on Concord and Merrimack River (1849), which showed his views on nature, life and literature. His masterpiece Walden Lake (1854) recorded his experience from/kloc. In his works, nature, man and transcendentalism are blended and merged, and there is nothing left. He is an important representative of transcendentalism in19th century.
Thoreau's prose is concise, powerful, simple, natural and thoughtful, which is unique among American prose in the19th century. His thoughts had a great influence on the British Labor Party, Gandhi in India and Martin Luther King, the black American leader.
1846 On February 4th, Thoreau went to Concord as planned to give a lecture entitled "Thomas Carlyle and His Works". At the end of the speech, the audience was still full of ideas. Please tell the speaker about his life in the forest. Relatively speaking, they seem to be more interested in this. In order to meet everyone's requirements, Thoreau prepared a topic, "My own history", which was given at 10 that month. I didn't expect the audience's enthusiasm to be unprecedented. They asked him to speak again in next week's class, so that more people would listen. Inspired by this lecture, Thoreau sorted out his lecture outline, and after a long period of writing, he finally finished the masterpiece Walden Lake (also known as Life in the Woods). Walden by henry david thoreau, published in 1854, is the most popular American nonfiction book in19th century. So far, this book has appeared in nearly 200 versions and has been translated into many languages. It is puzzling that this book has been regarded as an imitation and received a cold reception in the author's lifetime. The first edition of 2000 copies took more than five years to sell out. It was not until the author's death that people paid more and more attention to this book, and its evaluation began to change, and Thoreau's ideological significance was realized by us. 18 17
12 In July, Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts. 1837 graduated from Harvard University, and is a student with excellent academic performance. After graduation, he returned to his hometown to teach. From 184 1, he stopped teaching and turned to writing. With the support of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau lived in Concord and began his transcendentalism practice. During this period, Thoreau gave up poetry writing and began to write prose. At first, he wrote for the transcendental publication Dial. Later, his articles appeared in newspapers and magazines all over the country.
1845 On July 4th, American Independence Day, 28-year-old Thoreau came to Walden Lake, two miles from Concord, and built a small house to live in. After that, based on my observation and thinking about my life in Walden Lake, I compiled and published two books, namely A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Walden Lake.
While living in Walden Lake, Thoreau was arrested and imprisoned for opposing black slavery and refusing to pay poll tax. Although he only stayed in prison for one night and his friends paid taxes for him without his own consent, this night inspired him to think about many problems. After he came out, some citizens asked him why many people would rather go to jail than pay taxes. In order to explain this problem, he combined his own personal experience and wrote a famous political theory, Resistance to Civil Government, which was later renamed Civil Disobedience. The form of "non-violent resistance" that he advocated by relying on personal strength had a great influence on Gandhi in India and Martin Luther King, the black leader in the United States.
1947, Thoreau ended his lonely life and returned to his original village. He still maintains a simple lifestyle, devoting his main energy to writing, giving lectures and observing local animals and plants. Sometimes, in order to get extremely meager living expenses, I occasionally leave the village to work in my father's pencil factory for a few days. Thoreau died on May 6th, 862 at the age of 44. At that time, in the eyes of his contemporaries, he was just a paranoid and eccentric person, an admirer of Emerson. It was not until the turn of the century that he and his works were widely and profoundly recognized.
As one of Thoreau's major works, Walden recorded his life and thoughts in Walden for two years, two months and two days. In view of the failure of his first book, A Week of Concord and Merry Malik, he was extra cautious this time. He didn't rush to publish, but settled down to rewrite it to make it more perfect. In the next five years, he repeatedly revised, supplemented and perfected, and sometimes even changed the whole paragraph in order to make the content more harmonious and unified.
In Walden Lake, there are many pages about the observation records of animals and plants. Thoreau spent a lot of time and energy observing the changes of birds, animals, flowers and trees here, so that his contemporaries mistakenly understood this book as a document about nature and ignored the content about philosophy. In fact, Thoreau's contribution is based on these two aspects. In natural observation, he has published natural works by Guibert White and john james audubon. But it was not until the publication of Thoreau's works that people realized that he was the founder of Essays on Nature. Before him, works describing nature only appeared in the form of letters, narratives and magazine articles, reporting their discoveries of nature. It was Thoreau who made natural prose an independent portal and endowed it with new concepts. If we compare Thoreau's words about birds in Walden with audubon's American Birds, we can easily find that audubon's book is only a scientific report, while Thoreau's article is about the artistic creation of nature.
It is the truly lovely place of Thoreau's book to record the observation and experience of nature in detail and give it popular philosophical significance. Thoreau actively advocated a concept of life, a simple way of life, which is contrary to the increasingly rich modern material life. He is a practitioner of transcendentalism.
Walden is a unique art and one of the earliest prose works in modern American literature. Compared with the great writers of his time, this book has a unique style, even richer than the 20th century prose of talented writers such as Hawthorne, Melville and Emerson. This feature is embodied in its directness and conciseness, which is not as sloppy, meticulous, melodramatic, concise, hazy and abstract as Victorian prose. Reading this book, we will be surprised to find that this work, written in the19th century, is very close to the works of Hemingway, Henry James and others, but Thoreau's style is richer.
Thoreau is a responsible social critic. His purpose is to expose the shortcomings of the times. It is pointed out that people are becoming more and more complex, which will eventually lead to the decline of life. Relatively speaking, human life in primitive society is happier and more fulfilling than that in modern times. Some readers often have the wrong impression of Thoreau, thinking that he is just a retro who advocates returning to nature and abandoning modern civilization. However, we should note that Thoreau lived alone in the forest near Walden Lake for just over two years, accounting for only 5% of his life. During this time, the tourists who come and go have never stopped. He himself often visits his family and friends in the village. More importantly, after he left Walden Lake, he repeatedly opposed others to imitate his behavior. In his words, the reason why he lived in Walden Lake for a period of time was entirely out of personal interest. If one yearns for a simple life, he can do it anywhere, whether in new york, London, Mumbai or Tokyo, as long as he is sincere. With Walden Lake, our life will become more meaningful, more purposeful and happier. This is the true meaning of Walden Lake. Thoreau himself returned to Concord and continued to live a simple life, writing until his death.
Thoreau does not exclude the material enjoyment brought by modern scientific and technological civilization, but criticizes us for not making good use of it. "Improvement means the purpose of not improving", as he commented. "We connected the transoceanic cable, but we used it to ask Princess Adelaide if she had cough and asthma, and we didn't use it to communicate human thoughts. We built the railway, but we took it to the city to kill time. " From this point of view, Thoreau's significance to society lies not only in criticism, but also in guidance. He will not hesitate to expose the problems existing in society and point out the solutions responsibly. If we find that we can't resist the temptation of today's complicated material world at all, then the best way is to "simplify, simplify, simplify." (Simple, simple, simple. This is Thoreau's mantra. The objective world and human society are complicated, but our knowledge enables us to choose the right way of life, and we have enough courage to abandon other superfluous things, no matter how contemporary people tell us what to do.
Thoreau said when 1837 first entered the university that he would change the biblical doctrine of working six days a week into working six days a day. His life experience in Walden Lake realized this wish. There, he spent a little more than 28 dollars to build his own hut, and 27 cents a week was enough to maintain his life. In order to maintain such a simple life, he only needs to work for six weeks each year to earn enough living expenses for one year, and the remaining 46 weeks to do what he likes. Instead of wasting this precious time, he devoted himself to writing and natural research. Some people may say that Thoreau was too lazy to make any earth-shattering career in his life, but if you can notice that he created more than 20 first-class prose collections in his short life, you will sincerely appreciate his talent and diligence.
With the rapid development of the world economy and the improvement of material civilization, people's desires have also expanded, and Thoreau's worries have become a grim reality. In this regard, we might as well dig out Walden, read and understand its ideas carefully, and change some of our attitudes towards life, which is of great guiding significance to real life.