Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau was an American essayist, poet, and naturalist associated with Transcendentalism, a New England movement holding that intuition and nature reveal truths beyond established religion and materialism. From 1845 to 1847 he lived in a small cabin he built beside Walden Pond near Concord, an experiment in simple, self-reliant living that became his book Walden (1854). His essay "Resistance to Civil Government" (1849), later known as "Civil Disobedience," argued that individuals may refuse cooperation with unjust laws; he had spent a night in jail for withholding a poll tax. He also kept extensive nature journals and studied local plants and animals.