Thoreau Today

Henry David Thoreau in the Literature and Culture of the 21st Century

Questions and Findings by Chris Dodge

August 2007

The jacket of American Protest Literature, edited by Zoe Trodd (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006) says the anthology contains writings from eleven protest movements, ranging from the American revolution to the Vietnam War era peace movement. An except from Thoreau's "Resistance to Civil Government" is placed not in the chapter on abolition and slavery, but in the American revolution chapter, and its introduction begins be putting forth the old canard: "'What are you doing in there?' asked Emerson. 'What are you doing out there?' replied Thoreau." The excerpt is followed by an excerpt from John Brown's constitution "for the provisional government of a slave-free nation."

The introduction to a later piece in the book, an excerpt from Frederick Douglass's "The meaning of July Fourth for the Negro," notes," Protesters have often chosen July 4 as their independence day: Nat Turner planned his revolt for July 4, 1831; Henry David Thoreau went to Walden Pond on July 4, 1845; William Lloyd Garrison burned the Constitution on July 4, 1845; Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass on July 4, 1855; and John Brown timed his raid for July 4, 1858 and 1859 (though he had to postpone twice)."

The jacket of Mary Oliver's latest collection of new poems, Thirst (Beacon Press, 2006) quotes Susan Salter Times , Los Angeles Times, writing that Oliver's poems "teem with creation: ravens, bees, hawks, box turtles, bears. The landscape is Thoreauvian: ponds, marsh, grass and cattails; New England's 'salt brightness'; and fields in 'pale twilight.'"

I recently came across a Jane Kenyon poem, one I'd read before, titled "After the Hurricane," from her Let Evening Come and reprinted in Otherwise. Kenyon ends the poem by saying, "It was/the author of Walden, wasn't it,/who made a sacrament of saying no."

A July 8, 2007, Chicago Sun-Times review of Annie Dillard's new novel Maytrees reminds reviewer/book editor Cheryl L. Reed of "of Anne Morrow Lindbergh's A Gift From the Sea or Henry David Thoreau's Walden. These are books I love to read in the summer with the windows open, the breeze blowing and moths buzzing at the screens. Like Thoreau, Dillard takes us to that place of rugged independence, that struggle of making a living without forfeiting the mind." That's not surprising, given Thoreau's influence on Dillard; she wrote her Master's thesis back in the 60s on Walden.

A July 8, 2007 article in the Boston Globe, by Robert Preer, describes a proposal to construct a pedestrian bridge over Route 2, the busy four-lane highway that now runs past Walden Woods. Not an ordinary bridge, though: "A tree- and shrub-covered overpass 25 feet wide and packed with earth on its sides, serving as a passageway for both wildlife and humans." The article quotes Jack Ahern, "head of the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning at UMass-Amherst and leader of the overpass design team," as saying, "Some of us like to think this would be an appropriate, 21st-century innovation in the spirit of Thoreau—connecting people to the environment."

Sandy Zipp's "The Bitter Scribe of Quail Springs," an article in the Summer 2007 issue of Cabinet magazine, describes the life and legacy of John Samuelson, a Swedish immigrant to the United States who carved "ambiguous ponderings on politics" on large stones in the Mojave Desert in the twenties, "land that now lies within the bounds of Joshua Tree National Park." Zipp writes, "As lonely as it was and as arduous as the journey to get there must have been, the Mojave was, like Henry David Thoreau's Walden Pond one hundred years earlier, just about what [Earl Stanley] Gardner called it in the title of one of his memoirs—a 'Neighborhood Frontier' criss-crossed by generations of human interest and speculation." Zipp goes on to call Samuelson "[o]ur Jazz Age Thoreau."

A July 16, 2007 article in the Boston Globe describes how triathletes are using Walden Pond as a training location. The piece is headlined "Muscle Beach," subtitled "Thoreau's quiet retreat makes quite a splash as a training ground for triathletes."

A new trail in Maine, the Thoreau-Wabenaki Trail, commemorates the 150th anniversary of Thoreau's third and final trip into Maine's North Woods in 1857, but also encompasses the terrain covered on his 1846 ascent of Katahdin and his 1853 journey to Chesuncook Lake.

A review in the Bloomington, Illinois, Pantagraph of Curtis White's The Spirit of Disobedience (see here) says of White, "As -isms don't fit him easily, think of him as an 'other' — a person with a spirit of disobedience who, like Henry David Thoreau, chooses to disassociate himself from the system and the usual parameters of debate."

Though the book it describes has been out for a while, The Concord Journal has just published an article, July 5, 2007, about An Observant Eye: The Thoreau Collection at the Concord Museum and writer/curator David Wood.

An Associated Press article on war tax resistance that ran in Newsday on July 5, 2007 ("Tax resistance regains popularity as war protest"), mentions Thoreau and Joan Baez in the same breath: "War tax resistance, popularized by Henry David Thoreau in the 19th century and by singer Joan Baez and others during the Vietnam War, is gaining renewed interest because of Iraq."

In what passes for summertime journalism, Paul Greenberg's list of "Fifty Ways to the Beat the Heat" published on Townhall.com includes suggestion #10: "Don't hurry back, or anywhere else." Quoting Thoreau ("Nothing can be more useful to a man than a determination not to be hurried"), Greenberg adds, "He must have been a Southerner at heart."

The July 19, 2007, issue of Inside BU (Binghamton University) reports the death of Frederick M. Garber , "a Thoreau scholar who helped to establish the study of comparative literature at Binghamton when he joined the faculty in the 1960s."

A July 22, 2007, article about an Azerbaijan immigrant who sells ice cream from a truck parked at Walden Pond uses Thoreau as a trope throughout, from the title ("He went to the woods, to sell ice cream: where Thoreau soloed, a Soviet refugee practices self-reliance, too") to asking what flavor ice cream Thoreau might have preferred: "Asked what flavor ice cream the famous transcendentalist might have liked, [Concord historian Robert] Smith said, 'I think Henry would have been a vanilla ice cream kind of guy. Nothing fancy. He didn't like rich or fatty foods, and he kept a simple diet.' Mike Frederick, 38, director of the Thoreau Society in Concord, reasoned that since Thoreau often wrote about leading folks on berrying parties, 'perhaps if there were huckleberry ice cream, that might suit his fancy.' But Mat Leupold, 82, of Wayland, thinks Thoreau would have gone for chocolate. 'It appeals to the soul,' he said. Read the article: here

On July 19, 2007, the Boston Globe reported that "he town of Concord has agreed to transfer the title of Henry David Thoreau's birth house to the Thoreau Farm Trust. The Board of Selectmen recently signed off on the sale of the 18th-century farmhouse, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places."

Previous issues: August 2006 .. September 2006 .. October 2006 .. November 2006 .. December 2006 .. January 2007 .. February 2007 .. March 2007.. April 2007.. May/June 2007 .. July 2007

Email: Thoreau Today