Thoreau Today

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

Questions and Findings by Chris Dodge

July/August 2009

From an obituary in the May 31, 2009, issue of the Detroit Free Press ("Teacher Richard Amberg was loved by community," by M. L. Elrick): "A longtime journalism teacher at Grosse Pointe North High School, Mr. Amberg was also a beloved figure in his close-knit Grosse Pointe Park neighborhood. . . . In 1956, Mr. Amberg was an English teacher who appreciated Henry David Thoreau. That year he met Dorothy Senkowski during a European summer tour offered by Boston University, where she was pursuing a master's in education. They corresponded and, the next summer, Mr. Amberg took summer classes at Harvard University, minutes from where she was living. He proposed to her in a reproduction of Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond."

John Pipkin's first novel,Woods Burner (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday), inspired by the forest fire Henry David Thoreau accidentally set in 1844, has been widely reviewed (New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Minneapolis Star Tribune, etc. The May 1, 2009, review by Brenda Wineapple in the New York Times notes that "Pipkin surreptitiously incorporates sections of Thoreau's journals into his character's perspective," and mentions a related Adrienne Rich poem, writing, "'Thoreau setting fire to the woods.' That's the unforgettable, incandescent line in Adrienne Rich's poem 'The Phenomenology of Anger.'"

Thoreau seems to frequently quoted (and misquoted) in valedictorarian speeches. The Daily News of Newport News, Virginia, reported in June that Mathews High School valedictorian Jordan B. Hurst "told her peers to not be afraid of pursuing their interests. 'If you dream it, you can do it,' she said, quoting Henry David Thoreau.'' Hurst apparently was alluding to Thoreau's line from the last chapter of Walden, "If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."

Man, this Thoreau guy is getting a bad rap. I'm going to start a contest: find the most banal or wrongheaded paraphrase of Thoreau.

Newly published: Thoreau's Legacy: American Stories on Global Warming: An Online Anthology, an anthology published by the Union of Concerned Scientists and Penguin Classics who write, "Following in a uniquely American tradition of environmental writing begun by Henry David Thoreau and continued by great writers from Rachel Carson to E. O. Wilson, Thoreau's Legacy enhances our appreciation of the world around us and galvanizes support to preserve it for future generations. The 67 pieces of writing and art in the anthology are drawn from nearly 1,000 submissions about beloved places, animals, plants, people, and activities at risk from a changing climate and the efforts that individuals are making to save what they love. A foreword on global warming by the well-known author Barbara Kingsolver helps to set the context."

Thoreau Yesterday

From Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacation (Simon & Schuster, 2005): "According to [John Wilkes] Booth's sister, Asia, he said, 'John Brown was a man inspired, the grandest character of the century!' Booth's assessment was shared, based on the sermons preached in Brown's honor after he died, the church bells that rang in his memory across the North, the tributes written for him by the likes of the revered three-named Yankee poets Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Julia Ward Howe (who said Brown's martyrdom 'would make the gallows glorious like the cross'), the fact that Union soldiers turned the marching song 'John Brown's Body' into one of the top-ten hits of Civil War."

From an obituary of Russian-American anarchist Mollie Steiner by Paul Avrich ("Mollie Steimer: An Anarchist Life"): "Plagued by internal dissension, the Shturm group reorganized itself . . . adopting the name of Frayhayt (Freedom) and launching a new journal under that title, of which five numbers appeared between January and May of 1918, with cartoons by Robert Minor and articles by Maria Goldsmith and Georg Brandes, among others. For its motto the editors chose Henry David Thoreau's celebrated dictum, 'That government is best which governs not at all' (in Yiddish: 'Yene regirung iz dibeste, velkhe regirt in gantsn nit'), an extension of Jefferson's 'That government is best which governs least.'"

From volume one of Emma Goldman's autobiography, Living My Life (Dover edition, 1970): "The propagandist of an unpopular cause needs, even more than people, occasional lighthearted irresponsibility" (225). And: "[Some] people never seem to learn from experience. No matter how often they had seen the lion devour the lamb, they continued to cling to the hope that the nature of the beast might change. If only the lion could get to know the lamb betterm they argued, or talk matters over, he would surely learn to appreciate his gentle brother and thereby grow gentle himself."

From volume two of Goldman's Living My Life (Pluto Press edition, 1988, pp. 584-85): "On our way to New York we stopped off in Concord. I had always wanted to visit the home of America's past cultural epoch. The museum, the historic houses, and the cemetery were the only remaining witnesses of its days of glory. The inhabitants gave little indication that the quaint old town had once been a centre of poetry, letters, and philosophy. There was no sign that men and women had existed in Concord to whom liberty was a living ideal. The present reality was more ghostlike than the dead.

"We visited Frank B. Sanborn, the biographer of Henry David Thoreau, the last of the great Concord circle. It was Sanborn who, half a century before, had introduced John Brown to Thoreau, Emerson, and Alcott. He looked the typical aristocrat of intellect, his manner simple and gracious. With evident pride he spoke of the days when together with his sister he had, at the point of a gun, driven the tax-collectors from his homestead. He talked with reverence of Thoreau, the great lover of man and of beast, the rebel against the encroachments of the State on the rights of the individual, the supporter of John Brown when even his own friends had denied him. In detail Sanborn described to us the meeting Thoreau had carried through in memory of the black man's champion, in spite of almost unanimous opposition from the Concord coterie.

"Sanborn's estimate of Thoreau bore out my conception of the latter as the precursor of anarchism in the United States. To my surprise, Thoreau's biographer was scandalized at my remark. "No, indeed!" he cried; "anarchism means violence and revolution. It means Czolgosz. Thoreau was an extreme non-resistant." We spent several hours trying to enlighten this contemporary of the most anarchistic period of American thought about the meaning of anarchism."

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