Walden And On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience

In the early spring of 1845 Henry David Thoreau built and lived in a cabin near the shore of Walden Pond in rural Massachusetts. For the next two years he enacted his own Transcendentalist experiment living a simple life based on self-reliance individualism and harmony with nature. The journal he kept at that time evolved into his masterwork Walden an eloquent expression of a uniquely American philosophy. During the same period Thoreau endured a one-day imprisonment for his refusal to pay a poll tax an act of protest against the government for supporting the Mexican War to which he was morally opposed. In his essay On the Duty of Civil Disobedience Thoreau defends the principles of such nonviolent protest setting an example that has influenced such figures as Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. and endures to this day.