Walden Study Guide

Thoreau was born into a family of humble means, his father a pencil-maker. A gifted student, he attended Harvard College, where his studies included rhetoric and philosophy. After graduation, he tried out teaching, founding a progressive school with his brother, who not long after fell ill and died. He befriended Ralph Waldo Emerson, who became his mentor, introducing him into a circle of writers and inviting him to live in his house. Thoreau wandered for the rest of his life, working in his family's pencil factory in Concord for a while, spending two years in the woods near Walden Pond, returning to Emerson's house, and moving to Minnesota in an attempt to recover from tuberculosis, from which he eventually died.

The Transcendentalist movement had its roots in Unitarianism, a major Christian denomination in New England in the late eighteenth century that broke with Calvinism by abandoning the notion of inherent human depravity and placing value on the intellect as the path to spiritual wisdom. In the 1820s and 1830s, some Unitarians, beginning to see the Unitarian doctrine as too coldly rational and dry, formed Transcendentalism, which placed emphasis on the spiritual quest of the individual and his striving to be one with the divine. Transcendentalism was influenced by English and German Romanticism, including the writing of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Goethe, and is considered by some to be an American incarnation of Romanticism.

Thoreau and Emerson were the chief figures of Transcendentalism, a movement that promoted individualism and a belief in man's inherent spiritual goodness and was indebted to Eastern thought, notably the Bhagavad-Gita, which Thoreau cites in Walden. Other Transcendentalist books include Emerson's Nature, considered to be the movement's first text; Emerson's Self-Reliance, in which he sets out a belief at the very heart of Walden; and Thoreau's Civil Disobedience, in which he argues that the individual has an obligation to resist government when it goes against his conscience.