Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau was an American naturalist, essayist, poet and philosopher, and the most practical of the New England transcendentalists. Walden, his account of two years living simply at Walden Pond, turned a private experiment into a book that still divides readers between admiration and irritation. His essay Civil Disobedience argued that a citizen owes conscience more than the state, and it went on to shape political movements far beyond his own century. He spent much of his later life measuring, counting and describing the plants and seasons around Concord, work that reads today as early field science.