Thoreau’s World
Thoreau’s Desk
Most days, Thoreau spent
half of the daylight hours walking,
then returned to this desk and
turned life into literature.
Thoreau used the desk for most
of his adult life.
Seated at it, he wrote Walden,
“Civil Disobedience,”
thousands of pages in his journal,
essays, lectures, and letters.

The more he wrote the more he thought of himself as truly a writer. And it became a way of relating his innermost self to the outer world both of human beings but also as we all know of the natural world.

Laura Dassow Walls, Historian

And once he got started, it just snowballed and snowballed. It became like breathing, something he had to do to live.

Laura Dassow Walls, Historian
I sit before my green desk, in the chamber at the head of the stairs, and attend to my thinking.
Henry David Thoreau
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Who was Thoreau?

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) observed and wrote expansively about the natural world. In 1845, he went to live in a house by Walden Pond “to front only the essential facts of life.” His most productive period as a writer began during the two years he spent living deliberately in the woods.

Thoreau’s name has become synonymous with two themes: love of nature and uncompromising ethical values. Thoreau believed that the attempt to understand human concerns in the context of nature helped provide guidance for the proper conduct of life. He directed his career as a writer toward making that realization possible for others.

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