Henry David Thoreau was one of the major authors, lecturers, students, and thinkers of the American Transcendentalist movement. He was born in 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts, the son of a pencil-maker and storekeeper father and an abolitionist and homemaker mother. After graduating Harvard in 1837, Thoreau kept a journal in which he would jot down his thoughts, observations, and encounters with nature. Many of the essays and lectures he wrote were adapted from his journal entries, and his writings often blend the journal format with the lecture format.

In 1838 Thoreau opened a private school in Concord where he and his brother taught a traditional curriculum blended with hands-on projects and frequent field trips to nature. On one such trip Thoreau and his brother boated down two rivers, an experience that led to Thoreau’s first published piece of writing, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Shortly thereafter, Thoreau met the love of his life, Ellen Sewall. She declined his marriage invitation (and he never would marry) but introduced him to Lidian Emerson and her husband Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Emerson became a friend and teacher to Thoreau, who took a job as the Emersons’ live-in handyman after closing his school. With Emerson’s instruction, Thoreau studied Transcendentalism, and under Emerson’s aegis, Thoreau began to focus on writing instead of teaching.