Henry David Thoreau

Most-asked topics

• Transcendentalism and Thoreau's philosophy of self-reliance
• Walden: structure, themes of simplicity and nature
• Civil Disobedience: argument and political philosophy
• Thoreau's relationship with Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Thoreau's influence on Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.
• Nature writing and the American pastoral tradition
• Individual conscience versus the state
• Thoreau's place in 19th-century American literature

Previous-year themes

• ◆Transcendentalist ideas in Thoreau's prose
• ◆Walden as an account of simple living and self-sufficiency
• ◆Civil Disobedience and the ethics of resisting unjust law
• ◆Thoreau's influence on later movements of non-violent resistance
• ◆Nature and individualism in American Romantic/Transcendentalist writing
• ◆Thoreau's association with Emerson and the Concord circle

Common confusions

• ✕Confusing Thoreau's role with Emerson's: Emerson was the elder theorist and mentor of Transcendentalism, Thoreau its practitioner who put its ideas into lived experiment at Walden.
• ✕Assuming Thoreau lived at Walden Pond in total isolation for years, when in fact his stay lasted about two years, two months and two days, and he regularly visited Concord.
• ✕Mixing up the chronology: 'Civil Disobedience' (1849) actually predates Walden (1854), though Walden is often assumed to be the earlier, more famous work.
• ✕Forgetting that the essay is more accurately titled 'Resistance to Civil Government' in its original 1849 publication; 'Civil Disobedience' is the title used in later posthumous collections.
• ✕Treating The Maine Woods and Cape Cod as works published during Thoreau's lifetime, when both appeared posthumously after his death in 1862.
• ✕Conflating Transcendentalism with British Romanticism; while related in valuing nature and intuition, Transcendentalism is a distinct American philosophical and literary movement centred on Emerson, Thoreau, and the Concord circle.

Memory tricks