THIS IS THE DIARY JUNCTION - DATA AND LINKS FOR OVER 500 HISTORICAL AND LITERARY DIARISTS
PLEASE TAKE A MOMENT ALSO TO LOOK AT KIP FENN, A MAJOR NOVEL ABOUT THE 21st CENTURY
- freely available on this site
Thoreau, Henry David ___ 1817-1862
___ American ___ writer, philosopher
BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY
Born in Concord, Massachusetts,
Thoreau studied at Harvard but left with an undistinguished record. On returning
to Concord, he and his brother John set up a progressive school. It operated
for three years until John became ill in 1838. John died of lockjaw the
following year. A chance encounter with the poet and essayist Ralph Waldo
Emerson, who had moved to Concord while Thoreau was at Harvard, proved very
significant in Thoreau's life - the older man encouraging young Thoreau
in his writing. Out of their literary enthusiasms New England Transcendentalism
emerged. This was a movement that combined romanticism with reform, and
celebrated nature rather than man, the individual rather than the masses,
and emotion rather than reason. Together Thoreau and Emerson launched a
magazine called 'The Dial'. In 1845, Thoreau, still suffering grief over
his brother's death, and from a failure to secure a job, implemented an
idea borrowed from a Harvard classmate. With permission from Emerson, he
cut down some trees on Emerson's land, built a timber hut, and lived there,
in a simple manner, for two years. During this time, he wrote the drafts
of books, one in memory of a canoe trip he had taken with John. Thereafter,
Thoreau's commitment to Transcendentalism lessened and he became more interested
in botany; he also campaigned against slavery. He died relatively young
of tuberculosis. Thoreau's journal, which fills 47 volumes and has been
published in many different forms, is probably his most important work.
One
biography link
DIARY DATES, CONTENT DESCRIPTORS
1837-1861 ___ literary self nature
philosophy creativity people slavery
WEB TEXT LINKS
etext
etext
ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT LINKS
New
York Public Library ___ some
SOME PUBLISHED TITLES
The Journals of Henry D. Thoreau
The Writings of Henry David Thoreau
Writing Nature. Henry Thoreau's Journal
May 2005
THIS IS THE DIARY JUNCTION - DATA AND LINKS FOR OVER 500 HISTORICAL AND LITERARY DIARISTS
Please
email if you have any corrections, additions or comments. |
IMPORTANT NOTES AND CAUTIONS:
1) The first line of basic information
may be incomplete in several ways: some historical figures have different
names (titles, pen-names); their birth and death dates may be unknown or
uncertain (g - guess, c - circa); similarly, their occupations may be unknown,
or they may have had other jobs; and, for early diarists, I've used 'British'
a bit too freely. 2) The biographical summary may not be accurate. It was
compiled quickly from various sources, mostly on the internet, and the facts
were not checked anywhere near as rigorously as they would have been if
they'd been intended for publication in a printed form. 3) The journal dates
and descriptors (which are in no particular order) must be treated with
caution: since I have not examined the diaries myself, the descriptors are
only guesses based on bibliographies, anthologies and internet biographies.
4) For the biography and etext links, I have ignored any sites with charges,
and I have avoided, wherever possible, those with pop-ups or too much advertising.
I have limited myself to providing three etext links where there is some
variety between them. 5) For the original manuscript links, I have limited
myself to providing a maximum of two (although, for a few diarists, their
original diaries are held in more than two places). 6) I have provided the
titles - chosen randomly - for up to three printed editions of the diaries. |