Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
for study at Harvard. He was enrolled there in 1833 and graduated in 1837. He
then returned to Concord and taught briey at an elementary school, from which
he resigned when the school board ordered him to og students. In 1838, he took
a position as teacher and administrator at Concord Academy. In 1839, his brother
joined him as teacher and co-director. That same year, he and John took a twoweek
boating trip. In 1841, he left the Academy with his brother due to John’s poor
health, with John dying of lockjaw on January 1, 1842.
Thoreau had met Emerson in 1836, heard Emerson’s lecture “The American
Scholar,” and began to lecture himself. He later attended Bronson Alcott’s
intellectual “conversations” and became involved in the Transcendental Club.
Thoreau published poems and essays in The Dial, the journal sponsored by that
club. When he lived at his parents’ home in Concord, Thoreau assisted at his
father’s pencil factory. He also worked as a surveyor. When he lived at Emerson’s
home, he did handyman chores. When he lived with Emerson’s brother William
at Staten Island, he tutored the family’s son. In 1844, he burned around 300 acres
when he accidentally set re to Concord woods. On July 4, 1845, he moved into a
cabin that he built on Emerson’s land at Walden Pond, near the Concord woods.
He lived there two years, two months, and two days. During that time, he spent
one night in the Concord jail on July 23, 1846, for refusing to pay a poll tax that
would support a government that sanctioned slavery and waged a pro-slavery war
in Mexico.
In 1848, he published at his own expense A Week on the Concord and the
Merrimack Rivers, a hybrid-genre book recording his boat trip with his brother
which included poetry, nature observations, personal meditations, and scripture.
It sold 306 of its 1000 copies and received little public notice. He attended antislavery
conventions and published articles against slavery, including “Slavery in
Massachusetts” in 1854. That same year, he published Walden. In it, he explains
his reason for going to the woods:
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the
essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not,
when I came to die, discovery that I had not lived.
Thoreau publicly supported John Brown’s anti-slavery attack on Harper’s Ferry,
publishing “A Plea for John Brown” in 1859. He explored forests in Maine and made
walking tours in Massachusetts and Canada. He suered from tuberculosis for six
years before he died in 1862. Several of his works were published posthumously by
his friends, including The Maine Woods (1864), Cape Cod (1865), and A Yankee in
Canada, Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers (1866). His journals were published in
chronological order in 1906.
He did not, as Oscar Wilde would say of himself, put his art into his life. But he did
make his life his art. His writing style is marked by wit, puns, allusions, metaphors,
and symbols; its content comprehended social issues like slavery, economy,
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