During Henry David Thoreau's life, his works were almost completely ignored. However, Thoreau was not just a writer, essentially he was a philosopher primarily of individualism. He was also a naturalist and believed in non-conformity. Books such as Walden, and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack, (these books made him famous) wasn't all that he created, he also wrote essays, poetry, kept a garden and sketched drawing of nature. Furthermore, he kept a journal that he used in his later years as a way to record information and to record hypothesis's about nature. This journal, after being published, led him to become a pioneer of ecology and as a famous conservative. In addition, through the information he found he came upon the development theory which Darwin perfected decades later. His belief and reliance on nature, was not his chief interest, he was so entirely subjective that he distrusted scientific methods even when used by others. But he was looking for an idea which he could always prove from experience.
"My life hath been the poem I would have writ,
But I could not both live and live to utter it."
Henry David Thoreau
By writing from his personel life he was able to reach such grreat minds as Mahatma Ghandi and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., with his essay Civil Disobedience which brought about the idea of passive resistence. This idea was based on Thoreau spending a night in jail for not paying a poll tax. Civil Disobedience has been used as a handbook by several radical groups for centuries. It has also been considered as a prime source of problems throughout the world. However,Thoreau was the first American Nobel prize winner in literature. Henry David Thoreau died over a century ago, yet it could take another century before we can catch up to his original thought.
works cited: Foerster, Norman. "Thoreau as an Artist." Thoreau, A Century of Criticism. Edited. Walter Harding, Dalles, Texas: Southern Methodist University Press 1965, 123-136
Kazin, Alfred. "Thoreau's Journals." Thoreau, A Century of Critism. Edited Walter Harding, Dalles, Texas: Southern Methodist University Press 1965, 187-192