Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau lived nearly all his life in Concord, Massachusetts. In 1845 he built a small cabin at Walden Pond and lived there for two years, two months, and two days — an experiment in deliberate living that became Walden (1854), one of the most closely read books in American literature.

He was also a working surveyor, an abolitionist, and the author of the essay on civil disobedience that later influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. His journals, kept for a quarter century, run to some two million words of close attention to ordinary days.

Every Thoreau line in RiseHush is sourced to Walden or his verified published writings.