A Thoreau for Our Time

A Thoreau for Our Time Paul Schacht (bio) Laura Dassow Walls. Henry David Thoreau: A Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. xx + 640 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00. Robert M. Thorson. The Boatman: Henry David Thoreau's River Years. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. xviii + 336 pp. Notes, references, and index. $29.95. Geoff Wisner, ed. Thoreau's Animals. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. xxiv + 280 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $30.00. Chapter 8 of Laura Dassow Walls's new biography, Henry David Thoreau: A Life, opens with its subject at the Harmony Grove amphitheater in South Framingham, Massachusetts, poised to speak. It is July 4, 1854, nine years to the day since this "professed hermit" took up residence at Walden Pond (p. 313). The book he has been drafting and re-drafting for nearly a decade is at this very moment being bound by the printer and will be published the following month. In it, he will say that "I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time."1 Right now, however, he is anything but alone as—accompanied by Sojourner Truth, Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, and others—he stands before a black-draped, upside-down American flag, looking out on a crowd of some two thousand people gathered for "one of the era's largest and angriest antislavery rallies." The two most important previous biographies of Thoreau, Walter Harding's The Days of Henry Thoreau (1962) and Robert D. Richardson's Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (1986), both describe Thoreau's participation in the Framingham rally, but neither highlights and dramatizes it as Walls does. Chapter 8 lies near the center of her book, and in choosing to open it with this moment of action, and to use the rally as a frame for the entire chapter, Walls suggests that the moment is central to her understanding of who Thoreau was, why we should care about him, and why it is time to re-tell his story. In contrast to the common conception of Thoreau as a solitary, contemplative, libertarian, anti-social, even misanthropic recluse, Walls's Thoreau is socially engaged, deeply enmeshed in the community of his native and beloved Concord, and [End Page 42] endlessly active: not only in his forays into the wild but also as a man of business, letters, science, and social commitment. And his views—both on race relations and on matters ranging from technology to the environment to the conflict between private interests and the public good—have, Walls believes, much to offer us in the present moment. Thoreau's continuing relevance owes a great deal to the correspondences between his time and our own, and a strength of Walls's biography is the way it embeds a richly self-documented life (Thoreau's Journal, kept assiduously for almost a quarter century, numbers some two million words) in its historical context. Walls follows the thread of Thoreau's story as it crosses other threads that made up the pattern of nineteenth-century America, many of which run through our own time as well: the Black struggle for full civil, legal, economic, and social participation in American life; the expropriation of indigenous peoples' land and the willful devastation of Native cultures; capitalism's distortions of human beings' relations to one another and to nature; the destruction of the landscape in the name of "progress." Walls reports that on his 1861 trip to Minnesota, a desperate bid to clear his lungs of the tuberculosis that would kill him two years later, Thoreau passed through Madison, Wisconsin, "where the university had just let out for the year, and a twenty-three-year-old John Muir was, that very day, walking north to his home in Portage," having just finished his first term (p. 489). They would not encounter each other, nor had Muir yet encountered Thoreau's writing, but eventually the author of Walden would become an inspiration to the founder of the Sierra Club, and "in Muir's work, Thoreau's emerging environmental activism would mature into a national politics" (p. 490). On the same trip, Thoreau saw the Dakota...