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Henry David Thoreau
1. Life and Writings
Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1817 and died there in 1862, at the age of forty-four. Like that of his contemporary Søren Kierkegaard, Thoreau’s intellectual career unfolded in a close and polemical relation to the town in which he spent almost his entire life.
After graduating from Harvard in 1837, he struck up a friendship with fellow Concord resident Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose essay “Nature” he had first encountered earlier that year.
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Although the two American thinkers had a turbulent relationship due to serious philosophical and personal differences, they had a profound and lasting effect upon one another. It was in the fall of 1837 that Thoreau made his first entries in the multivolume journal he would keep for the rest of his life.
Most of his published writings were developed from notes that first appeared on these pages, and Thoreau subsequently revised many entries, suggesting that his journ