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Brief Lives

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

In Thoreau’s bicentenary, Martin Jenkins looks at the famous American eccentric.

A few years ago I went into a bookshop to buy a copy of Thoreau’s Walden (1854). I couldn’t find one, but the assistant could: in the fiction section. This may reflect the difficulty of classifying Thoreau. Was he a nature writer, a poet, a travel writer, a political thinker, even a philosopher – even all of these? Perhaps; but not, I am certain, a novelist!

Thoreau’s works do not help to classify him. He wrote widely on a range of subjects.

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