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61-560: White Bicycles – Making Music in the 1960s is the memoir of music producer Joe Boyd . It is published by Serpent's Tail . A companion CD of music he had produced in the 1960s and associated with the book was published by Fledg'ling Records at the same time. The title refers to the 1967 song " My White Bicycle " by Tomorrow , which was about Amsterdam 's community bicycle program . The author, record and film producer Joe Boyd has produced music for artists including Pink Floyd , Nick Drake , Fairport Convention and R.E.M. He produced

122-586: A binder. The process of mixing graphite and clay, known as the Conté process, had been first patented by Nicolas-Jacques Conté in 1795. Thoreau made profitable use of a graphite source found in New Hampshire that had been purchased in 1821 by his uncle, Charles Dunbar. The company's other source of graphite had been Tantiusques , a mine operated by Native Americans in Sturbridge, Massachusetts . Later, Thoreau converted

183-532: A classic American work that explores natural simplicity, harmony, and beauty as models for just social and cultural conditions. The American poet Robert Frost wrote of Thoreau, "In one book ... he surpasses everything we have had in America." The American author John Updike said of the book, "A century and a half after its publication, Walden has become such a totem of the back-to-nature, preservationist, anti-business, civil-disobedience mindset, and Thoreau so vivid

244-592: A genre of their own, including, from the First World War , Ernst Jünger ( Storm of Steel ) and Frederic Manning 's Her Privates We . Memoirs documenting incarceration by Nazi Germany during the war include Primo Levi 's If This Is a Man , which covers his arrest as a member of the Italian Resistance Movement , followed by his life as a prisoner in Auschwitz ; and Elie Wiesel 's Night , which

305-470: A journal?' So I make my first entry to-day." Thoreau was a philosopher of nature and its relation to the human condition. In his early years he followed transcendentalism , a loose and eclectic idealist philosophy advocated by Emerson, Fuller, and Alcott. They held that an ideal spiritual state transcends, or goes beyond, the physical and empirical, and that one achieves that insight via personal intuition rather than religious doctrine. In their view, Nature

366-794: A late-night excursion to count the rings of tree stumps during a rainstorm, he became ill with bronchitis . His health declined, with brief periods of remission, and he eventually became bedridden. Recognizing the terminal nature of his disease, Thoreau spent his last years revising and editing his unpublished works, particularly The Maine Woods and Excursions , and petitioning publishers to print revised editions of A Week and Walden . He wrote letters and journal entries until he became too weak to continue. His friends were alarmed at his diminished appearance and were fascinated by his tranquil acceptance of death. When his aunt Louisa asked him in his last weeks if he had made his peace with God, Thoreau responded, "I did not know we had ever quarreled." Aware he

427-562: A leave of absence from Harvard, during which he taught at a school in Canton, Massachusetts , living for two years at an earlier version of today's Colonial Inn in Concord. His grandfather owned the earliest of the three buildings that were later combined. After he graduated in 1837, Thoreau joined the faculty of the Concord public school, but he resigned after a few weeks rather than administer corporal punishment . He and his brother John then opened

488-527: A literary work of art or historical document, are emerging as a personal and family responsibility. The Association of Personal Historians was a trade association for professionals who assisted individuals, families, and organizations in documenting their life stories. It dissolved in 2017. With the expressed interest of preserving history through the eyes of those who lived it, some organizations work with potential memoirists to bring their work to fruition. The Veterans History Project , for example, compiles

549-462: A mutual friend. Emerson, who was 14 years his senior, took a paternal and at times patron-like interest in Thoreau, advising the young man and introducing him to a circle of local writers and thinkers, including Ellery Channing , Margaret Fuller , Bronson Alcott , and Nathaniel Hawthorne and his son Julian Hawthorne , who was a boy at the time. Emerson urged Thoreau to contribute essays and poems to

610-590: A protester, so perfect a crank and hermit saint, that the book risks being as revered and unread as the Bible." Thoreau moved out of Emerson's house in July 1848 and stayed at a house on nearby Belknap Street. In 1850, he moved into a house at 255 Main Street , where he lived until his death. In the summer of 1850, Thoreau and Channing journeyed from Boston to Montreal and Quebec City . These would be Thoreau's only travels outside

671-543: A quarterly periodical, The Dial , and lobbied the editor, Margaret Fuller, to publish those writings. Thoreau's first essay published in The Dial was "Aulus Persius Flaccus", an essay on the Roman poet and satirist, in July 1840. It consisted of revised passages from his journal, which he had begun keeping at Emerson's suggestion. The first journal entry, on October 22, 1837, reads, " 'What are you doing now?' he asked. 'Do you keep

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732-558: A similar refusal, were all pertinent, well considered, and reasoned. I took great pleasure in this deed of Thoreau's. Thoreau revised the lecture into an essay titled " Resistance to Civil Government " (also known as "Civil Disobedience"). It was published by Elizabeth Peabody in the Aesthetic Papers in May 1849. Thoreau had taken up a version of Percy Shelley 's principle in the political poem " The Mask of Anarchy " (1819), which begins with

793-712: A two-year experiment in simple living , moving to a small house he had built on land owned by Emerson in a second growth forest around the shores of Walden Pond , having had a request to build a hut on Flints Pond , near that of his friend Charles Stearns Wheeler , denied by the landowners due to the Fairhaven Bay incident. The house was in "a pretty pasture and woodlot" of 14 acres (5.7 hectares) that Emerson had bought, 1 + 1 ⁄ 2 miles (2.5 kilometers) from his family home. Whilst there, he wrote his only extended piece of literary criticism, " Thomas Carlyle and His Works ". On July 24 or July 25, 1846, Thoreau ran into

854-405: A way to record and publish their own account of their public exploits. Authors included politicians or people in court society and were later joined by military leaders and businessmen. An exception to these models is Henry David Thoreau 's 1854 memoir Walden , which presents his experiences over the course of two years in a cabin he built near Walden Pond . Twentieth-century war memoirs became

915-719: Is an accepted version of this page Active Defunct Publications Works Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) was an American naturalist, essayist, poet, and philosopher. A leading transcendentalist , he is best known for his book Walden , a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay " Civil Disobedience " (originally published as "Resistance to Civil Government"), an argument in favor of citizen disobedience against an unjust state. Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry amount to more than 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions are his writings on natural history and philosophy, in which he anticipated

976-460: Is based on his life prior to and during his time in the Auschwitz, Buna Werke , and Buchenwald concentration camps. In the early 1990s, memoirs written by ordinary people experienced a sudden upsurge, as an increasing number of people realized that their ancestors' and their own stories were about to disappear, in part as a result of the opportunities and distractions of technological advances. At

1037-653: Is best which governs not at all;' and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.... But, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government." Amos Bronson Alcott and Thoreau's aunt each wrote that "Thoreau" is pronounced like the word thorough ( / ˈ θ ʌr oʊ / THURR -oh —in General American , but more precisely / ˈ θ ɔːr oʊ / THOR -oh —in 19th-century New England). Edward Waldo Emerson wrote that

1098-485: Is the free memoir , a form of nonfiction that, in presenting the past, deviates from factual and literal accuracy. This play of truth distinguishes the free memoir from the memoir per se, the word 'free' meaning what it does in free translation , that is, 'not literal or exact.'” The term 'memoir' is used in some academic contexts to describe an essay on a learned subject. Examples include explanatory texts accompanying geologic maps . Henry David Thoreau This

1159-530: Is the outward sign of inward spirit, expressing the "radical correspondence of visible things and human thoughts", as Emerson wrote in Nature (1836). On April 18, 1841, Thoreau moved in with the Emersons . There, from 1841 to 1844, he served as the children's tutor; he was also an editorial assistant, repairman and gardener. For a few months in 1843, he moved to the home of William Emerson on Staten Island , and tutored

1220-452: The Great Lakes region in 1861, when he visited Niagara Falls , Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee , St. Paul and Mackinac Island . He was provincial in his own travels, but he read widely about travel in other lands. He devoured all the first-hand travel accounts available in his day, at a time when the last unmapped regions of the earth were being explored. He read Magellan and James Cook ;

1281-777: The Middle Ages , Geoffrey of Villehardouin , Jean de Joinville , and Philippe de Commines wrote memoirs, while the genre was represented toward the end of the Renaissance , through the works of Blaise de Montluc and Margaret of Valois , that she was the first woman to write her Memoirs in modern-style. Until the Age of Enlightenment encompassing the 17th and 18th centuries, works of memoir were written by Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury ; François de La Rochefoucauld , Prince de Marcillac of France; and Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon , who wrote Memoirs at his family's home at

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1342-463: The arctic explorers John Franklin , Alexander Mackenzie and William Parry ; David Livingstone and Richard Francis Burton on Africa; Lewis and Clark ; and hundreds of lesser-known works by explorers and literate travelers. Astonishing amounts of reading fed his endless curiosity about the peoples, cultures, religions and natural history of the world and left its traces as commentaries in his voluminous journals. He processed everything he read, in

1403-449: The Beagle . He kept detailed observations on Concord's nature lore, recording everything from how the fruit ripened over time to the fluctuating depths of Walden Pond and the days certain birds migrated. The point of this task was to "anticipate" the seasons of nature, in his word. He became a land surveyor and continued to write increasingly detailed observations on the natural history of

1464-509: The Concord Academy, a grammar school in Concord, in 1838. They introduced several progressive concepts, including nature walks and visits to local shops and businesses. The school closed when John became fatally ill from tetanus in 1842 after cutting himself while shaving. He died in Henry's arms. Upon graduation Thoreau returned home to Concord, where he met Ralph Waldo Emerson through

1525-764: The Gallic Wars . In the work, Caesar describes the battles that took place during the nine years that he spent fighting local armies in the Gallic Wars . His second memoir, Commentarii de Bello Civili (or Commentaries on the Civil War ) is an account of the events that took place between 49 and 48 BC in the civil war against Gnaeus Pompeius and the Senate . The noted Libanius , teacher of rhetoric who lived between an estimated 314 and 394 AD, framed his life memoir as one of his literary orations , which were written to be read aloud in

1586-876: The Individual in relation to Government", explaining his tax resistance at the Concord Lyceum . Bronson Alcott attended the lecture, writing in his journal on January 26: Heard Thoreau's lecture before the Lyceum on the relation of the individual to the State—an admirable statement of the rights of the individual to self-government, and an attentive audience. His allusions to the Mexican War, to Mr. Hoar 's expulsion from Carolina, his own imprisonment in Concord Jail for refusal to pay his tax, Mr. Hoar's payment of mine when taken to prison for

1647-810: The United States. It is as a result of this trip that he developed lectures that eventually became A Yankee in Canada . He jested that all he got from this adventure "was a cold". In fact, this proved an opportunity to contrast American civic spirit and democratic values with a colony apparently ruled by illegitimate religious and military power. Whereas his own country had had its revolution, in Canada history had failed to turn. In 1851, Thoreau became increasingly fascinated with natural history and narratives of travel and expedition. He read avidly on botany and often wrote observations on this topic into his journal. He admired William Bartram and Charles Darwin 's Voyage of

1708-688: The abolitionist movement began to accept Brown as a martyr, and by the time of the American Civil War entire armies of the North were literally singing Brown's praises . As a biographer of Brown put it, "If, as Alfred Kazin suggests, without John Brown there would have been no Civil War, we would add that without the Concord Transcendentalists, John Brown would have had little cultural impact." Thoreau contracted tuberculosis in 1835 and suffered from it sporadically afterwards. In 1860, following

1769-528: The advice of Emerson, using Emerson's publisher, Munroe, who did little to publicize the book. In August 1846, Thoreau briefly left Walden to make a trip to Mount Katahdin in Maine , a journey that was later recorded in "Ktaadn", the first part of The Maine Woods . Thoreau left Walden Pond on September 6, 1847. At Emerson's request, he immediately moved back to the Emerson house to help Emerson's wife, Lidian, manage

1830-535: The boat so perfectly, either with two paddles or with one, that it seemed instinct with his own will, and to require no physical effort to guide it." He was not a strict vegetarian, though he said he preferred that diet and advocated it as a means of self-improvement. He wrote in Walden , "The practical objection to animal food in my case was its uncleanness; and besides, when I had caught and cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me essentially. It

1891-431: The castle of La Ferté-Vidame . While Saint-Simon was considered a writer possessing a high level of skill for narrative and character development, it was not until well after his death that his work as a memoirist was recognized, resulting in literary fame. Over the latter half of the 18th through the mid-20th century, memoirists generally included those who were noted within their chosen profession. These authors wrote as

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1952-519: The college". He commented, "Let every sheep keep its own skin", a reference to the tradition of using sheepskin vellum for diplomas. Thoreau's birthplace still exists on Virginia Road in Concord. The house has been restored by the Thoreau Farm Trust, a nonprofit organization, and is now open to the public. The traditional professions open to college graduates—law, the church, business, medicine—did not interest Thoreau, so in 1835 he took

2013-416: The dispersal of seeds by winds or animals. In this lecture, first presented to a cattle show in Concord, and considered his greatest contribution to ecology, Thoreau explained why one species of tree can grow in a place where a different tree did previously. He observed that squirrels often carry nuts far from the tree from which they fell to create stashes. These seeds are likely to germinate and grow should

2074-534: The documentary Jimi Hendrix and the film Scandal . In 1980 he founded Hannibal Records. He lives in London where he writes for The Guardian and The Independent newspapers. This article about a biographical or autobiographical book on musicians is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Memoir Memoirs have been written since the ancient times, as shown by Julius Caesar 's Commentarii de Bello Gallico , also known as Commentaries on

2135-437: The face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay; at the same time he advocated abandoning waste and illusion in order to discover life's true essential needs. Thoreau was a lifelong abolitionist , delivering lectures that attacked the fugitive slave law while praising the writings of Wendell Phillips and defending the abolitionist John Brown . Thoreau's philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced

2196-451: The family's sons while seeking contacts among literary men and journalists in the city who might help publish his writings, including his future literary representative Horace Greeley . Thoreau returned to Concord and worked in his family's pencil factory, which he would continue to do alongside his writing and other work for most of his adult life. He resurrected the process of making good pencils with inferior graphite by using clay as

2257-539: The first of three trips to northern Maine. His expectations were high because he hoped to find genuine, primeval America. But contact with real wilderness in Maine affected him far differently than had the idea of wilderness in Concord. Instead of coming out of the woods with a deepened appreciation of the wilds, Thoreau felt a greater respect for civilization and realized the necessity of balance." Of alcohol, Thoreau wrote, "I would fain keep sober always. ... I believe that water

2318-933: The first recorded student protest in the American colonies. David Henry was named after his recently deceased paternal uncle, David Thoreau. He began to call himself Henry David after he finished college; he never petitioned to make a legal name change. He had two older siblings, Helen and John Jr., and a younger sister, Sophia Thoreau . None of the children married. Helen (1812–1849) died at age 37, from tuberculosis. John Jr. (1814–1842) died at age 27, of tetanus after cutting himself while shaving. Henry David (1817–1862) died at age 44, of tuberculosis. Sophia (1819–1876) survived him by 14 years, dying at age 56, of tuberculosis. He studied at Harvard College between 1833 and 1837. He lived in Hollis Hall and took courses in rhetoric , classics, philosophy, mathematics, and science. He

2379-609: The household while her husband was on an extended trip to Europe. Over several years, as he worked to pay off his debts, he continuously revised the manuscript of what he eventually published as Walden, or Life in the Woods in 1854, recounting the two years, two months, and two days he had spent at Walden Pond. The book compresses that time into a single calendar year, using the passage of the four seasons to symbolize human development. Part memoir and part spiritual quest, Walden at first won few admirers, but later critics have regarded it as

2440-539: The local tax collector , Sam Staples, who asked him to pay six years of delinquent poll taxes . Thoreau refused because of his opposition to the Mexican–American War and slavery , and he spent a night in jail because of this refusal. The next day Thoreau was freed when someone, likely to have been his aunt, paid the tax, against his wishes. The experience had a strong impact on Thoreau. In January and February 1848, he delivered lectures on "The Rights and Duties of

2501-539: The local laboratory of his Concord experience. Among his famous aphorisms is his advice to "live at home like a traveler". After John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry , many prominent voices in the abolitionist movement distanced themselves from Brown or damned him with faint praise . Thoreau was disgusted by this, and he composed a key speech, " A Plea for Captain John Brown ", which was uncompromising in its defense of Brown and his actions. Thoreau's speech proved persuasive:

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2562-424: The luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. Thoreau was an early advocate of recreational hiking and canoeing , of conserving natural resources on private land, and of preserving wilderness as public land. He was himself a highly skilled canoeist; Nathaniel Hawthorne , after a ride with him, noted that "Mr. Thoreau managed

2623-568: The memoirs of those who have served in a branch of the United States Armed Forces – especially those who have seen active combat. Memoirs are usually understood to be factual accounts of people's lives, typically from their early years, and are derived from the French term mémoire , meaning "reminiscence" or "memory." However, some works, which may be called free memoirs, are less strictly bound to remembered facts: "One type of life story

2684-410: The methods and findings of ecology and environmental history , two sources of modern-day environmentalism. His literary style interweaves close observation of nature, personal experience, pointed rhetoric, symbolic meanings, and historical lore, while displaying a poetic sensibility, philosophical austerity , and attention to practical detail. He was also deeply interested in the idea of survival in

2745-539: The most varied and unusual instructive sayings. Henry David Thoreau was born David Henry Thoreau in Concord, Massachusetts , into the "modest New England family" of John Thoreau, a pencil maker, and Cynthia Dunbar. His father was of French Protestant descent. His paternal grandfather had been born on the UK crown dependency island of Jersey . His maternal grandfather, Asa Dunbar, led Harvard's 1766 student " Butter Rebellion ",

2806-496: The name should be pronounced "Thó-row", with the h sounded and stress on the first syllable. Among modern-day American English speakers, it is perhaps more commonly pronounced / θ ə ˈ r oʊ / thə- ROH —with stress on the second syllable. Thoreau had a distinctive appearance, with a nose that he called his "most prominent feature". Of his appearance and disposition, Ellery Channing wrote: His face, once seen, could not be forgotten. The features were quite marked:

2867-486: The nose aquiline or very Roman, like one of the portraits of Caesar (more like a beak, as was said); large overhanging brows above the deepest set blue eyes that could be seen, in certain lights, and in others gray,—eyes expressive of all shades of feeling, but never weak or near-sighted; the forehead not unusually broad or high, full of concentrated energy and purpose; the mouth with prominent lips, pursed up with meaning and thought when silent, and giving out when open with

2928-552: The pencil factory to produce plumbago, a name for graphite at the time, which was used in the electrotyping process. Once back in Concord, Thoreau went through a restless period. In April 1844 he and his friend Edward Hoar accidentally set a fire that consumed 300 acres (120 hectares) of Walden 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, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what

2989-627: The political thoughts and actions of notable figures such as Leo Tolstoy , Mahatma Gandhi , and Martin Luther King Jr. Thoreau is sometimes referred to retrospectively as an anarchist , but may perhaps be more properly regarded as a proto-anarchist . In his seminal essay, "Civil Disobedience", Thoreau wrote as follows: "I heartily accept the motto,— 'That government is best which governs least;' and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe,— 'That government

3050-533: The powerful images of the unjust forms of authority of his time and then imagines the stirrings of a radically new form of social action. At Walden Pond, Thoreau completed a first draft of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers , an elegy to his brother John, describing their trip to the White Mountains in 1839. Thoreau did not find a publisher for the book and instead printed 1,000 copies at his own expense; fewer than 300 were sold. He self-published on

3111-481: The privacy of his study. This kind of memoir refers to the idea in ancient Greece and Rome , that memoirs were like "memos", or pieces of unfinished and unpublished writing, which a writer might use as a memory aid to make a more finished document later on. The Sarashina Nikki is an example of an early Japanese memoir, written in the Heian period . A genre of book writing, Nikki Bungaku , emerged during this time. In

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3172-407: The rise of environmental history and ecocriticism as academic disciplines, several new readings of Thoreau began to emerge, showing him to have been both a philosopher and an analyst of ecological patterns in fields and woodlots. For instance, "The Succession of Forest Trees", shows that he used experimentation and analysis to explain how forests regenerate after fire or human destruction, through

3233-402: The same time, psychology and other research began to show that familiarity with genealogy helps people find their place in the world and that life review helps people come to terms with their own past. With the advent of inexpensive digital book production in the first decade of the 21st century, the genre exploded. Memoirs written as a way to pass down a personal legacy, rather than as

3294-689: The spreading mass of humanity in North America. He decried the latter endlessly but felt that a teacher needs to be close to those who needed to hear what he wanted to tell them. The wildness he enjoyed was the nearby swamp or forest, and he preferred "partially cultivated country". His idea of being "far in the recesses of the wilderness" of Maine was to "travel the logger's path and the Indian trail", but he also hiked on pristine land. In an essay titled, "Henry David Thoreau, Philosopher", environmental historian Roderick Nash wrote, "Thoreau left Concord in 1846 for

3355-505: The squirrel die or abandon the stash. He credited the squirrel for performing a "great service ... in the economy of the universe." He traveled to Canada East once, Cape Cod four times, and Maine three times; these landscapes inspired his "excursion" books, A Yankee in Canada , Cape Cod , and The Maine Woods , in which travel itineraries frame his thoughts about geography, history and philosophy. Other travels took him southwest to Philadelphia and New York City in 1854 and west across

3416-402: The town, covering an area of 26 square miles (67 square kilometers), in his journal, a two-million-word document he kept for 24 years. He also kept a series of notebooks, and these observations became the source of his late writings on natural history, such as "Autumnal Tints", "The Succession of Trees", and "Wild Apples", an essay lamenting the destruction of the local wild apple species. With

3477-432: The world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. Thoreau felt a need to concentrate and work more on his writing. In 1845, Ellery Channing told Thoreau, "Go out upon that, build yourself a hut, & there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no other alternative, no other hope for you." Thus, on July 4, 1845, Thoreau embarked on

3538-563: Was a member of the Institute of 1770 (now the Hasty Pudding Club ). According to legend, Thoreau refused to pay the five-dollar fee (approximately equivalent to $ 153 in 2023) for a Harvard master's diploma, which he described thus: Harvard College offered it to graduates "who proved their physical worth by being alive three years after graduating, and their saving, earning, or inheriting quality or condition by having Five Dollars to give

3599-552: Was dying, Thoreau's last words were "Now comes good sailing", followed by two lone words, "moose" and "Indian". He died on May 6, 1862, at age 44. Amos Bronson Alcott planned the service and read selections from Thoreau's works, and Channing presented a hymn. Emerson wrote the eulogy spoken at the funeral. Thoreau was buried in the Dunbar family plot; his remains and those of members of his immediate family were eventually moved to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts. Most of

3660-421: Was insignificant and unnecessary, and cost more than it came to. A little bread or a few potatoes would have done as well, with less trouble and filth." Thoreau neither rejected civilization nor fully embraced wilderness. Instead he sought a middle ground, the pastoral realm that integrates nature and culture. His philosophy required that he be a didactic arbitrator between the wilderness he based so much on and

3721-454: Was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to

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