How long did thoreau live in the woods at walden pond

Join eStore Donate. Henry David Thoreau was born and lived nearly all his life in Concord, Massachusetts, a small town about twenty miles west of Boston. He received his education at the public school in Concord and at the private Concord Academy. Proving to be a better scholar than his more fun-loving and popular elder brother John, he was sent to Harvard.

He did well there and, despite having to drop out for several months for financial and health reasons, was graduated in the top half of his class in Thoreau's graduation came at an inauspicious time. In , America was experiencing an economic depression and jobs were not plentiful.

Furthermore, Thoreau found himself temperamentally unsuited for three of the four usual professions open to Harvard graduates: the ministry, the law, and medicine. The fourth, teaching, was one he felt comfortable with, since both of his elder siblings, Helen and John, were already teachers. He was hired as the teacher of the Concord public school, but resigned after only two weeks because of a dispute with his superintendent over how to discipline the children.

For a while he and John considered seeking their fortunes in Kentucky, but at last he fell back onto working in his father's pencil factory. Thoreau's family participated in the "quiet desperation" of commerce and industry through the pencil factory owned and managed by his father. Thoreau family pencils, produced behind the family house on Main Street, were generally recognized as America's best pencils, largely because of Henry's research into German pencil-making techniques.

In , he decided to start his own school in Concord, eventually asking John to help him. The two brothers worked well together and vacationed together during holidays. In September , they spent a memorable week together on a boating trip up the Concord and Merrimack rivers to Mount Washington in New Hampshire. About the same time both brothers became romantically interested in Ellen Sewall, a frequent visitor to Concord from Cape Cod. In the fall of the next year, both brothers — first John and then Henry — proposed marriage to her.

But because of her father's objections to the Thoreaus' liberal religious views, Ellen rejected both proposals. When John endured a lengthy illness in , the school became too much for Henry to handle alone, so he closed it.

Through these things, Thoreau experienced how life truly is truly meant to be lived. Also possibly a variant of Old German names with Wald-, such as Walter. Literary: Thoreau's book and the pond " Walden ". Also form of Waldo. At Walden , he ate lots of rice, beans which he grew himself, and produce like potatoes, peas, corn, and turnips.

But vegetarian or not, his writings reflect a deep love for animals, and for the belief that it was mankind's destiny to stop eating them. It is owned and managed by the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation, and sees nearly , visitors every year.

Living deliberately means that you follow a path, but you designed it yourself. You state where you want to go and develop a strategy to get there. What did Thoreau learn from his experiment in the woods? The Walden Experiment. For the background to this post, click here. Elsewhere he said that his purpose in going to Walden Pond was to 'transact some private business with the fewest obstacles. He means that we all fall into our complex routines of daily life and we make a beaten track for ourselves.

Also, he is trying to say that once a path is made , it is very easy for others to follow it. Thoreau felt he needed independence in order to pursue his study of nature and to have a mind that was free, clear, and original.

So philosophy and independence were two of the many things that were important to him. He could not depend entirely on nature or on his own mind for instruction. Why did Henry David Thoreau choose to spend two years in a cabin? Because he was trying to escape his social anxieties. As a member, you'll also get unlimited access to over 79, lessons in math, English, science, history, and more. Thoreau goes to live in the woods because he wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life and learn what they had to teach and to discover if he had really lived.

Henry never intended for Walden to be a biography or an exact chronology of his time at Walden Pond, but neither did he lie nor deceive his readers. Today, Walden fits into the genre of creative non-fiction. Henry does not pretend to be totally isolated, but tells his readers from the start that he was only half a mile 0.

In writing Walden , Henry compressed two years into one which informs us very directly and did not include every event, such as his night in jail or trip to Maine.

Henry selected content appropriate to the themes of his work, such as solitude, simplicity, nature and seasons. In Walden , like in all of his works, he aims to get across a specific message to his audience. In order to do that, he creates a persona that is not the same as Henry David Thoreau, the person. Misconception: Henry was opposed to technology and progress. In reality: Henry had an open mind and enjoyed learning about new ideas and inventions.