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  • Henry David Thoreau: A Life by Laura Dassow Walls
  • Lucas Nossaman
Henry David Thoreau: A Life. By Laura Dassow Walls. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. ISBN 978-0-226-34469-0. Pp. xx + 615. $35.00.

Laura Walls is on a mission. She wants to bury the Henry David Thoreau brought down to us “in ice, chilled into a misanthrope, prickly with spines, isolated as a hermit and nag” (xix). This is a common perception of him: the scholarly one is a divided Thoreau, also a hermit, who at times speaks for nature, at times for social justice. According to Walls, “the historical Thoreau was no hermit, and as Thoreau’s own record shows, 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” (xviii). If all this sounds like a polemic, this biography is far from it: Walls’s Life is an instantly readable narrative of a nineteenth-century American radical who was much more complex and dynamic than his reputation has allowed.

Previous biographies of Thoreau are not nearly as accessible as this one. To mention two, Robert Richardson Jr.’s Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (1986) focuses primarily on Thoreau’s reading and intellectual journey, while Walter Harding’s The Days of Henry Thoreau (1965) is more suitable now for scholars needing a documentary account of his life. With its crisp and illustrative prose, Walls’s book belongs in every public library. Consider her account of the shaping of Walden: “But by 1854, Walden was no longer. Of course the pond was still there, but most of the trees were cut, and his house was gone. Nothing marked the site but a weedy cellar hole. If the meaning of his years there were to live on, Thoreau needed to recreate his performance as a book, convert the material place—the wooden-floored house reeking of woodsmoke and damp wool, pine needles tracked underfoot, the mouse drawn on the door—into a space of words” (350). A well-established Thoreauvian, Walls is the ideal scholar to write an updated biography. She seems to have internalized the details of his life and writing, bringing them out in a way that breathes new life into this American figure.

Walls would have us remember that Thoreau lived at Walden Pond for only two years, two months, and two days. After his “experiment” in simple living, he returned to Concord, where he participated in the cause of abolition and helped slaves to freedom, surveyed his neighbors’ lands for his day job, and had charge of Emerson’s household while the latter was abroad and then of his own family’s after his father passed away in 1859. In staying in Concord he often endured poverty and debt: though his father was an artisan who achieved some measure of success with the help of Henry, who invented a better pencil for the family business, in his lifetime Thoreau never enjoyed great popularity as a writer, going into debt after he essentially self-published his first book. Still he didn’t let this keep him from adventures. Indeed, he tells us in Walden he has “traveled much in Concord,” and as Walls tells it, he found ways to travel lightly and cheaply to the Maine woods, Cape Cod, Canada, and Minnesota, among other places.

Thoreau often felt overshadowed by his mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, and in his early career especially he struggled to find the right audience for his work. Walls [End Page 583] recounts the difficulties of his friendship with Emerson while she also highlights other friendships and acquaintances that were influential to him, in particular Margaret Fuller, who sometimes rejected Thoreau’s work for the Dial but set him on a course—perhaps even toward the pond—when she told him he needed not “to say so constantly of [Nature], ‘She is mine.”’ “She is not yours,” Fuller told him frankly, “until you have been more hers” (122). Walls points to Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes as an influence on Thoreau’s first book, A...

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