Henry David Thoreau

Personal Statement: Hi, my name is Henry David Thoreau. I was born in 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts with my parents John and Cynthia and my siblings  Helen and John Jr. I went to Harvard with the help of my brother paying off my tuition with his salary as a teacher. After graduating Harvard I went into teaching then opened up a school with my brother. After it closed I kept my family’s pencil business and that was my way of getting a living. Also, I moved in with a close family neighbor, Ralph Waldo Emerson. I always saw myself as an aspiring and philosophical writer through college and kept a journal of different poems, essays, and reviews that were about nature and philosophy. Later I decided to move into the woods in shack near Walden pond to experience life isolated from the world. Here I spend my two years observing nature, and putting everything to paper. That’s where I wrote Walden (1854) which is a set of essays on the environmental movement. Walden is my greatest achievements that also sets a basis for the environmentalist. You could say I was the father of the Environmental Movement. During the Civil War, specifically the Mexican War, I refused to pay toll taxes. I was too upset because of the Civil War I didn't want to give money to the government. Essentially if you don’t pay your taxes you get put in jail. In jail I wrote in my journal several essays and other writings. A certain essay I wrote was called “Civil Disobedience.” This was primarily about fighting for what you believe in without the physical violence. If you jump to a bunch of years later, this influenced people like Gandhi, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King Jr.

Issues: Transcendentalism began as a radical religious movement and a new way of thinking when people were upset by how the Unitarian Church was running and turned to nature. Transcendentalists, as in me, believed that an individual could be more powerful than the institution itself, like a church. Meaning that in every person’s mind was a larger and powerful voice (god), and there was no reason for a church.  Transcendentalism also goes hand in hand with nature. Nature is pure and significant and also nature is self-knowledge. Your mind and nature is all you really need. Its not logic, its something you are born with. I also supported individualism, and that politics and strict religion came in between a person’s influences. I praised the abolition movement as well, and supported the anti-slavery groups.

Solutions: I believed strongly in Transcendentalism and nature as a way of life. Also because of my passion for nature I hoped to spread environmental movements with Walden. Because the church and politics were so corrupt I hoped to bring people to the sense of becoming individualistic. And for my hatred with political parties I relied on my essays on individualism and civil disobedience to spread the realization of fighting without the violence. This allowed for revolutionary heroes to grow, as mentioned before, Gandhi, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King Jr. That to me makes me a successful person, because all in all, I made an influence and helped made a change even if it was after my death. In addition, as a Transcendentalist I hoped to achieve the goal of relating the natural world to the individual’s world they have inside themselves.

Relationships: I would be most comfortable talking to Ralph Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Theodore Parker, at the dinner party. I would not be comfortable sitting next to Joseph Smith and Henry Clay.