Culture  /  Book Review

Thoreau: A Radical for All Seasons

The surprising persistence of Henry David Thoreau.
Book
Laura Dassow Walls
2017
Henry David Thoreau
Benjamin D. Maxham/National Portrait Gallery

Henry David Thoreau had a genius for inspiring haters. More than 160 years after Walden first appeared, that genius is undimmed. In a 2015 New Yorker essay memorably titled “Pond Scum,” Kathryn Schulz called him “narcissistic,” “pinched and selfish,” “as parochial as he was egotistical,” and an execrable writer whose best-remembered work is “unnavigable” and “fundamentally adolescent.” In his own time, satirical poets derided him as Ralph Waldo Emerson’s dwarf, a stubby-legged imitator of the more famous Transcendentalist.

When I teach Thoreau to law students and undergraduates, they tend to agree with the “Pond Scum” assessment. They find him vain; they leap to defend the “old people” that Thoreau insisted had nothing to teach him, the shopkeepers he called “occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life.” They suspect that he failed to check his privilege by reflecting on the conditions that enabled a Harvard-educated young white man to wander freely in the woods for a while, without fearing his neighbors or the dark. I would bet that fewer Americans have read Walden than have heard that Thoreau’s mother did his laundry.

Yet Thoreau persists. Laura Dassow Walls, who teaches English at Notre Dame, has written an engaging, sympathetic, and subtly learned biography that makes a strong case for Thoreau’s importance; she also seems a little baffled that anyone could fail to admire him. Her Thoreau was an abolitionist who brought Frederick Douglass to speak at the Concord Lyceum—a kind of community university—and participated in the Underground Railroad, to the point of risking charges of treason by helping enslaved people flee to Canada. While living at Walden, Thoreau hosted the annual festival of the Concord Female Anti-­Slavery Society, where the speakers included Lewis Hayden, who had escaped slavery in Kentucky. He was deeply interested in the indigenous cultures that remained in New England, seeking out conversation and even friendship with Native Americans, studying the Wampanoag language on his own while at Harvard, and filling more than 3,000 notebook pages with material from these investigations. He also lived in a household of strong women: His sisters set the pace in antislavery activism, and Thoreau willingly took his cues from them. He even admired and sympathized with the laborers building the railroads that would clatter along the edge of his beloved pond.