Henry David Thoreau was a nineteenth-century American essayist, poet and practical philosopher. He is known for having lived the doctrines of transcendentalism as can be testified by his seminal work, Walden (1854)—a collection of 18 essays embodying his experiment with simplistic living.

He was enrolled in Harvard University in 1833. In the company of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the renowned American essayist, Thoreau’s hopes of becoming a poet became plausible. At the dawn of the 1840s, Thoreau formally took up the profession of a poet. With Emerson at the helm, the transcendentalists started a magazine, The Dial, which carried many of Thoreau’s poems including ‘Sympathy’. The first of his nature essays, ‘Natural History of Massachusetts’, was also published in the magazine.

By the end of his stay at Walden Pond (1845–47), Thoreau had become less of a transcendentalist—he had started lecturing and writing against slavery. His essay ‘On the Duty of Civil Disobedience’, which was first published in May 1849, extrapolates that he was an exponent of civil liberties. He also published a book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), following his two-year stay on the shores of the pond in Concord.

Thoreau spent most of his life in Massachusetts. He died of tuberculosis in May 1862 at the mere age of 44.