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Clara Barton

Clarissa Harlowe Barton (December 25, 1821 – April 12, 1912) was an American nurse who founded the American Red Cross. She was a hospital nurse in the American Civil War, a teacher, and a patent clerk. Since nursing education was not then very formalized and she did not attend nursing school, she provided self-taught nursing care. Barton is noteworthy for doing humanitarian work and civil rights advocacy at a time before women had the right to vote. She was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1973.

Early life
Clarissa Harlowe Barton was born on December 25, 1821, in North Oxford, Massachusetts, a small farming community. She was named after the titular character of Samuel Richardson's novel Clarissa. Her father was Captain Stephen Barton, a member of the local militia and a selectman who influenced his daughter's patriotism and humanitarianism. He was a soldier under the command of General Anthony Wayne in his violent removal of Indigenous peoples in the northwest. He was also the leader of progressive thought in the Oxford village area. Barton's mother was Sarah Stone Barton.

In 1825, when she was three years old, Barton was sent to school with her brother Stephen, where she reportedly excelled in reading and spelling. At school, she became close friends with Nancy Fitts. Barton was very timid as a child, and Fitts was her only known childhood friend.

Beginning in 1832, when Barton was ten years old, she acted as a nurse to her brother David for two years after he fell from the roof of a barn and sustained a severe head injury. In nursing her brother, she learned how to deliver prescription medications and perform the practice of bloodletting, in which blood was removed from the patient by leeches attached to the skin. David eventually made a full recovery.

Barton's parents tried to encourage her to be more outgoing by enrolling her in Colonel Stones High School, but Barton became more timid and depressed and would not eat. She was brought back home to regain her health.

Upon her return, Barton's family relocated to help the widow of Barton's cousin, who had been left to manage four children and a farm after her husband's death. Barton helped to perform maintenance and repair work on the home in which her family was to live. After the work was done, she was reportedly concerned with becoming a burden to her family. Therefore, she began to play with her male cousins, participating in their activities, such as horseback riding. When Barton injured herself, her mother decided that she should focus on developing more traditionally feminine skills and invited a female cousin to help develop Barton's femininity.

To assist Barton in overcoming her shyness, her parents persuaded her to become a schoolteacher. She studied at the Clinton Liberal Institute in Clinton, New York. She achieved her first teacher's certificate in 1839, at 17 years old. Barton led an effective redistricting campaign that allowed the children of workers to receive an education.

Early professional life
Barton became an educator in 1838 and served for 11 years in schools in and around Oxford, Massachusetts. Barton fared well as a teacher; she knew how to handle children, particularly the boys since as a child she enjoyed her boy cousins' and brothers' company. She learned how to act like them, making it easier for her to relate to and control the boys in her care. After her mother's death in 1851, the family home closed down. Barton decided to further her education by pursuing writing and languages at the Clinton Liberal Institute in New York. In this college, she developed many friendships that broadened her point of view on many issues concurring at the time. The principal of the institute recognized her tremendous abilities and admired her work. This friendship lasted for many years, eventually turning into a romance. As a writer, her terminology was pristine and easy to understand. Her writings and bodies of work could instruct the local statesmen.

While teaching in Hightstown, Barton learned about the lack of public schools in Bordentown, the neighboring city. In 1852, she was contracted to open a free school in Bordentown, which was the first ever free school in New Jersey. She was successful, and after a year she had hired another woman to help teach over 600 people. Both women were making $250 a year. This accomplishment compelled the town to raise nearly $4,000 for a new school building. Once it was completed, Barton was replaced as principal by a man elected by the school board. They saw the position as head of a large institution to be unfitting for a woman. She was demoted to "female assistant" and worked in a harsh environment until she had a nervous breakdown along with other health ailments, and quit.

In 1855, she moved to Washington, D.C., and began work as a clerk in the U.S. Patent Office; this was the first time a woman had received a substantial clerkship in the federal government and at a salary equal to a man's salary. For three years, she received much abuse and slander from male clerks. Subsequently, under political opposition to women working in government offices, her position was reduced to that of copyist, and in 1858, under the administration of James Buchanan, she was fired because of her "Black Republicanism". After the election of Abraham Lincoln, having lived with relatives and friends in Massachusetts for three years, she returned to the patent office in the autumn of 1860, now as temporary copyist, in the hope she could make way for more women in government service.

American Civil War

On April 19, 1861, the Baltimore Riot resulted in the first bloodshed of the American Civil War. The victims, members of the 6th Massachusetts Militia, were transported after the violence to the unfinished Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., where Barton lived at the time. Wanting to serve her country, Barton went to the railroad station when the victims arrived and nursed 40 men. Barton provided crucial, personal assistance to the men in uniform, many of whom were wounded, hungry and without supplies other than what they carried on their backs. She personally took supplies to the building to help the soldiers.

Barton quickly recognized them, as she had grown up with some of them and even taught some. Barton, along with several other women, personally provided clothing, food, and supplies for the sick and wounded soldiers. She learned how to store and distribute medical supplies and offered emotional support to the soldiers by keeping their spirits high. She would read books to them, write letters to their families for them, talk to them, and support them.

It was on that day that she identified herself with army work and began her efforts towards collecting medical supplies for the Union soldiers. Prior to distributing provisions directly onto the battlefield and gaining further support, Barton used her own living quarters as a storeroom and distributed supplies with the help of a few friends in early 1862, despite opposition in the War Department and among field surgeons. Ladies' Aid Society helped in sending bandages, food, and clothing that would later be distributed during the Civil War. In August 1862, Barton finally gained permission from Quartermaster Daniel Rucker to work on the front lines. She gained support from other people who believed in her cause. These people became her patrons, her most supportive being Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts.

After the First Battle of Bull Run, Barton placed an ad in a Massachusetts newspaper for supplies; the response was a profound influx of supplies. She worked to distribute stores, clean field hospitals, apply dressings, and serve food to wounded soldiers in close proximity to several battles, including Cedar Mountain, Second Bull Run, Antietam, and Fredericksburg. Barton helped both Union and Confederate soldiers. Supplies were not always readily available though. At the battle of Antietam, for example, Barton used corn-husks in place of bandages. Speaking of her commitment to being a nurse in the war after experiencing battle, Clara would say, "I shall remain here while anyone remains, and do whatever comes to my hand. I may be compelled to face danger, but never fear it, and while our soldiers can stand and fight, I can stand and feed and nurse them."

In April 1863, Barton accompanied her brother, David, to Port Royal, South Carolina in the Union-occupied Sea Islands after he was appointed as a quartermaster within the Union Navy. Clara Barton resided in the Sea Islands until early 1864. While in South Carolina, she became friends with prominent abolitionist and feminist Frances Dana Barker Gage, who had traveled south to educate formerly enslaved people (see Port Royal Experiment). Barton also became acquainted with Jean Margaret Davenport, an actress from England who was then residing on the Sea Islands with her husband, Union General Frederick W. Lander. Barton provided medical care to the Black soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment following their attack on Fort Wagner. Additionally, she traveled to Morris Island to nurse Union soldiers there, accompanied by a Black woman named Betsey who worked under Barton during her time in the Sea Islands. She quarreled with General Quincy Adams Gillmore after he suddenly ordered her to evacuate her post at Morris Island. Also in the Sea Islands, she became acquainted with a Union officer, Colonel John J. Elwell. Historian Stephen B. Oates claims that Barton and Elwell had a romantic and sexual relationship.

In 1864, she was appointed by Union General Benjamin Butler as the "lady in charge" of the hospitals at the front of the Army of the James. Among her more harrowing experiences was an incident in which a bullet tore through the sleeve of her dress without striking her and killed a man to whom she was tending. She was known as the "Florence Nightingale of America". She was also known as the "Angel of the Battlefield" after she came to the aid of the overwhelmed surgeon on duty following the battle of Cedar Mountain in Northern Virginia in August 1862. She arrived at a field hospital at midnight with a large number of supplies to help the severely wounded soldiers. This naming came from her frequent timely assistance as she served troops at the battles of Fairfax Station, Chantilly, Harpers Ferry, South Mountain, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Charleston, Petersburg and Cold Harbor.

Postwar
After the end of the American Civil War, Barton discovered that thousands of letters from distraught relatives to the War Department were going unanswered because the soldiers they were asking about were buried in unmarked graves. Many of the soldiers were labeled as "missing." Motivated to do more about the situation, Barton contacted President Lincoln in hopes that she would be allowed to respond officially to the unanswered inquiries. She was given permission, and "The Search for the Missing Men" commenced.

After the war, she ran the Office of Missing Soldiers, at 437 ½ Seventh Street, Northwest, Washington, D.C., in the Gallery Place neighborhood. The office's purpose was to find or identify soldiers killed or missing in action. Barton and her assistants wrote 41,855 replies to inquiries and helped locate more than 22,000 missing men. Barton spent the summer of 1865 helping find, identify, and properly bury 13,000 individuals who died in Andersonville prison camp, a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp in Georgia. She continued this task over the next four years, burying 20,000 more Union soldiers and marking their graves. Congress eventually appropriated $15,000 toward her project.

The American Red Cross

Clara Barton achieved widespread recognition by delivering lectures around the country about her war experiences from 1865 to 1868. During this time she met Susan B. Anthony and began an association with the woman's suffrage movement. She also became acquainted with Frederick Douglass and became an activist for civil rights. After her countrywide tour she was both mentally and physically exhausted and under doctor's orders to go somewhere that would take her far from her current work. She closed the Missing Soldiers Office in 1868 and traveled to Europe. In 1869, during her trip to Geneva, Switzerland, Barton was introduced to the Red Cross and Dr. Appia; he later would invite her to be the representative for the American branch of the Red Cross and help her find financial benefactors for the start of the American Red Cross. She was also introduced to Henry Dunant's book A Memory of Solferino, which called for the formation of national societies to provide relief voluntarily on a neutral basis.

In the beginning of the Franco-Prussian War, in 1870, she assisted the Grand Duchess of Baden in the preparation of military hospitals and gave the Red Cross society much aid during the war. At the joint request of the German authorities and the Strasbourg Comité de Secours, she superintended the supplying of work to the poor of Strasbourg in 1871, after the Siege of Paris, and in 1871 had charge of the public distribution of supplies to the destitute people of Paris. At the close of the war, she received honorable decorations of the Golden Cross of Baden and the Prussian Iron Cross.

When Barton returned to the United States, she inaugurated a movement to gain recognition for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) by the United States government. In 1873, she began work on this project. In 1878, she met with President Rutherford B. Hayes, who expressed the opinion of most Americans at that time which was the U.S. would never again face a calamity like the Civil War. Barton finally succeeded during the administration of President Chester Arthur, using the argument that the new American Red Cross could respond to crises other than war such as natural disasters like earthquakes, forest fires, and hurricanes.

Barton became President of the American branch of the society, which held its first official meeting at her apartment in Washington, DC, May 21, 1881. The first local society was founded August 22, 1881 in Dansville, Livingston County, New York, where she maintained a country home.

The society's role changed with the advent of the Spanish–American War during which it aided refugees and prisoners of the civil war. Once the Spanish–American War was over the grateful people of Santiago built a statue in honor of Barton in the town square, which still stands there today. In the United States, Barton was praised in numerous newspapers and reported about Red Cross operations in person.

Domestically in 1884 she helped in the floods on the Ohio river, provided Texas with food and supplies during the famine of 1887, took workers to Illinois in 1888 after a tornado, and that same year took workers to Florida for the yellow fever epidemic. Within days after the Johnstown Flood in 1889, she led her delegation of 50 doctors and nurses in response, founding what would become Conemaugh Health System. In 1896, responding to the humanitarian crisis in the Ottoman Empire of the Hamidian massacres, Barton arrived in Constantinople February 15. Barton along with Minister Terrell spoke with Tewfik Pasha, the Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs, to procure the right to enter the interior. Barton herself stayed in Constantinople to conduct the business of the expedition. Her General Field Agent, J. B. Hubbell, M.D.; two Special Field Agents, E. M. Wistar and C. K. Wood; and Ira Harris M. D., Physician in Charge of Medical Relief in Zeitoun and Marash, traveled to the Armenian provinces in the spring of 1896, providing relief and humanitarian aid to the Armenian population who were victims of the massacres done in 1894–1896 by Ottoman Empire. Barton also worked in hospitals in Cuba in 1898 at the age of 77. Barton's last field operation as President of the American Red Cross was helping victims of the Galveston hurricane in 1900. The operation established an orphanage for children. As criticism arose of her mixing professional and personal resources, Barton was forced to resign as president of the American Red Cross in 1904 at the age of 83 because her egocentric leadership style fit poorly into the formal structure of an organizational charity. She had been forced out of office by a new generation of all-male scientific experts who reflected the realistic efficiency of the Progressive Era rather than her idealistic humanitarianism. In memory of the courageous women of the civil war, the Red Cross Headquarters was founded. During the dedication, not one person said a word. This was done in order to honor the women and their services. After resigning, Barton founded the National First Aid Society.

Final years
She continued to live in her Glen Echo, Maryland home which also served as the Red Cross Headquarters upon her arrival at the house in 1897. Barton published her autobiography in 1908, titled The Story of My Childhood. On April 12, 1912, she died in her home at the age of 90 of pneumonia.

Religious beliefs
Although not formally a member of the Universalist Church of America, in a 1905 letter to the widow of Carl Norman Thrasher, she identified herself with her parents' church as a "Universalist". My dear friend and sister:

Your belief that I am a Universalist is as correct as your greater belief that you are one yourself, a belief in which all who are privileged to possess it rejoice. In my case, it was a great gift, like St. Paul, I "was born free", and saved the pain of reaching it through years of struggle and doubt.

My father was a leader in the building of the church in which Hosea Ballow preached his first dedication sermon. Your historic records will show that the old Huguenot town of Oxford, Mass. erected one of, if not the first Universalist Church in America. In this town I was born; in this church I was reared. In all its reconstructions and remodelings I have taken a part, and I look anxiously for a time in the near future when the busy world will let me once more become a living part of its people, praising God for the advance in the liberal faith of the religions of the world today, so largely due to the teachings of this belief.

Give, I pray you, dear sister, my warmest congratulations to the members of your society. My best wishes for the success of your annual meeting, and accept my thanks most sincerely for having written me.

Fraternally yours, (Signed) Clara Barton. While she was not an active member of her parents' church, Barton wrote about how well known her family was in her hometown and how many relationships her father formed with others in their town through their church and religion.

Clara Barton National Historic Site
In 1975, the Clara Barton National Historic Site, located at 5801 Oxford Road, Glen Echo, Maryland, was established as a unit of the National Park Service at Barton's home, where she spent the last 15 years of her life. As the first National Historic Site dedicated to the accomplishments of a woman, it preserves the early history of the American Red Cross, since the home also served as an early headquarters of the organization.

The National Park Service restored eleven rooms, including the Red Cross offices, the parlors, and Barton's bedroom. Visitors to the house were able to gain a sense of how Barton lived and worked. Guides led tourists through the three levels, emphasizing Barton's use of her unusual home. In October 2015 the site was closed for repairs and remained closed, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, through 2021. The house reopened to the public in 2022, although the second and third floors of the house remain closed, due to "structural concerns".

Clara Barton's Missing Soldiers Office
In 1869, Barton closed the Missing Soldiers Office and headed to Europe. The third floor of her old boardinghouse was boarded up in 1913, and the site forgotten. The site was "lost" in part because Washington, DC realigned its addressing system in the 1870s. The boardinghouse became 437 ½ Seventh Street Northwest (formerly 488-1/2 Seventh Street West).

In 1997, General Services Administration carpenter Richard Lyons was hired to check out the building for its demolition. He found a treasure trove of Barton items in the attic, including signs, clothing, Civil War soldier's socks, an army tent, Civil War-era newspapers, and many documents relating to the Office of Missing Soldiers. This discovery led to the NPS saving the building from demolition. It took years, however, for the site to be restored. The Clara Barton's Missing Soldiers Office Museum, run by the National Museum of Civil War Medicine, opened in 2015.

Fictional depictions

 * Numbering All the Bones by Ann Rinaldi features Barton and Andersonville Prison, a Civil War prison with terrible conditions.
 * Angel of Mercy (MGM, 1939) is a biographical short film directed by Edward L. Cahn, starring Sara Haden as Barton and Ann Rutherford as a woman whose brother's death in a Civil War battle inspires her to join Barton in her work.
 * In the NBC TV series Voyagers! (1982–1983), Phineas Bogg and Jeffrey Jones travel through time to make sure history proceeds correctly. In the episode "The Travels of Marco ... and Friends", season 1, episode 9, original airdate December 3, 1982, Phineas and Jeffrey rescue Barton (Patricia Donahue) from a burning wagon, but she is on the verge of succumbing to smoke inhalation. Jeffrey (a young boy from 1982) applies mouth-to-mouth resuscitation (a technique unknown in Barton's time) and saves her life, thus enabling her to go on to found the American Red Cross.
 * Mandy Moore plays Barton in an episode of Drunk History which features a summary of Barton's accomplishments during and after the Civil War as narrated by Amber Ruffin.
 * America: The Motion Picture features a highly fictionalized version of Clara Barton as voiced by Megan Leahy.
 * In the HBO series The Gilded Age (2022), Barton is played by Linda Emond.
 * In Civil War on Sunday, the 21st book in the Magic Tree House series, main characters Jack and Annie meet and help Clara Barton in her work. Barton imparts some of her wisdom to them regarding how to help the wounded soldiers.

Schools
There are 25 schools named after Clara Barton
 * Clara Barton Elementary School in Fargo, North Dakota
 * Clara Barton Elementary School in Levittown, Pennsylvania
 * Barton Hall at Montclair State University in Upper Montclair, New Jersey
 * Clara Barton Elementary on Del Amo Boulevard in Long Beach, California
 * Clara Barton Elementary School in Alton, Illinois
 * Clara Barton Elementary School in Redmond, Washington
 * Clara Barton Elementary School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
 * Clara Barton Elementary School in Anaheim, California
 * Barton County Community College in Great Bend, Kansas
 * Clara Barton Elementary School in The Bronx
 * Clara Barton Elementary School in Cherry Hill, New Jersey
 * Clara Barton Elementary School in Chicago, Illinois
 * Clara Barton Elementary School in Corona, California
 * Clara Barton Elementary School in Oxford, Massachusetts
 * Clara Barton Elementary School in San Diego (now San Diego Cooperative Charter School)
 * Clara Barton Elementary School in Rochester, New York
 * Clara Barton Elementary School in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania
 * Clara Barton Junior High School in Royal Oak, Michigan
 * Clara Barton High School for Health Professions in Brooklyn
 * Clara Barton House, a residence hall at Towson University, Towson, Maryland
 * Clara Barton Open School in Minneapolis
 * Clara Barton School in Cabin John, Maryland (now Clara Barton Community Center)
 * Clara Barton School in Bordentown, New Jersey
 * Clara Barton School in Fargo, North Dakota
 * Clara Barton School in Philadelphia
 * Barton Academy in Mobile, Alabama

Streets

 * Clara Barton Road in Oxford, Massachusetts
 * Clara Barton Lane in Galveston, Texas
 * Barton Boulevard in Rockledge, Florida
 * Clara Barton Drive in Albany, New York
 * Clara Barton Drive in Fairfax Station, Virginia
 * Clara Barton Parkway in Maryland
 * Clara Barton Street in Dansville, New York
 * Clara Barton Boulevard in Garland, Texas
 * Clara Barton Circle in Sylacauga, Alabama
 * Clara Bartonstraat in Amsterdam
 * Barton Road in Windsor, Maine
 * Clara Barton Road in Douglas County, Wisconsin
 * Clara Barton Street in Sagua la Grande, Cuba

Other

 * Barton, a crater on Venus
 * Barton Associates, Peabody, Massachusetts
 * Barton Center for Diabetes Education, North Oxford, Massachusetts
 * Barton County, Kansas
 * Barton Hall, Iowa State University
 * Barton House in Towson University
 * Barton Towers, in Royal Oak, Michigan, on the former site of Clara Barton Junior High School
 * Barton's Crossing, Pittsfield, Massachusetts, a homeless shelter
 * Clara Barton, a Norwegian Air Boeing 737-8MAX (part of Norwegian's "Tailfin Heroes" series)
 * Clara Barton, New Jersey, an unincorporated community located within Edison Township
 * Clara Barton Auditorium, United States Patent and Trademark Office, Alexandria, Virginia
 * Clara Barton Community Center, Cabin John, Maryland
 * Clara Barton District, a regional association of Unitarian Universalist Association member congregations
 * Clara Barton First Aid Squad, Edison, New Jersey
 * Clara Barton Library Branch, Edison, New Jersey
 * Clara Barton Home and Gardens, Johnstown, Pennsylvania
 * Clara Barton Hospital and Clinics, Hoisington, Kansas
 * Clara Barton Memorial Forest in Lake Clear, New York, planted in 1925
 * Clara Barton Post Office Building, at 14 Walnut Street in Bordentown, New Jersey
 * Clara Barton Service Area, on the New Jersey Turnpike in Oldmans Township, New Jersey
 * Clara Barton Shelter, Stony Brook State Park, Dansville, New York
 * Clara Barton Tree, a giant sequoia tree in the Giant Forest, Sequoia National Park
 * Heritage of Clara Barton, Edison, New Jersey, an Assisted Living Community
 * Lake Barton in Burke, Virginia
 * The House of Clara Barton at The King's College (New York City)

Other remembrances

The Clara Barton Homestead, where Barton was born in Massachusetts is open to the public as a museum.

A stamp with a portrait of Barton and an image of the American Red Cross symbol was issued in 1948.

Barton was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1973.

Barton was featured in 1995 in a set of U.S. stamps commemorating the Civil War.

In 2019, Barton was announced as one of the members of the inaugural class of the Government Executive magazine's Government Hall of Fame.

Exhibits in the east wing of the third floor, 3 East, of the National Museum of American History are focused on the United States at war. The Clara Barton Red Cross ambulance was at one point the signature artifact there but is no longer on display.

The school in the Disney show Sydney to the Max is named Clara Barton Middle School.

Clara Barton was inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame in 2008.

Published works

 * Barton, Clara H. The Red Cross: In Peace and War. Washington, D.C.: American Historical Press, 1898..
 * Barton, Clara H. Story of the Red Cross: Glimpses of Field Work. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1904..
 * Barton, Clara H. The Story of My Childhood. New York: Baker & Taylor Company, 1907. Reprinted by Arno Press in 1980..

Historiography

 * Amico, Eleanor B., ed. Reader's Guide to Women's Studies ( Fitzroy Dearborn, 1998) pp. 56–57

title: Clara Barton


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Julian of Norwich

Julian of Norwich (c. 1343 – after 1416), also known as Juliana of Norwich, the Lady Julian, Dame Julian or Mother Julian, was an English anchoress of the Middle Ages. Her writings, now known as Revelations of Divine Love, are the earliest surviving English-language works by a woman, although it is possible that some anonymous works may have had female authors. They are also the only surviving English-language works by an anchoress.

Julian lived in the English city of Norwich, an important centre for commerce that also had a vibrant religious life. During her lifetime, the city suffered the devastating effects of the Black Death of 1348–1350, the Peasants' Revolt (which affected large parts of England in 1381), and the suppression of the Lollards. In 1373, aged 30 and so seriously ill she thought she was on her deathbed, Julian received a series of visions or shewings of the Passion of Christ. She recovered from her illness and wrote two versions of her experiences, the earlier one being completed soon after her recovery—a much longer version, today known as the Long Text, was written many years later.

Julian lived in permanent seclusion as an anchoress in her cell, which was attached to St Julian's Church, Norwich. Four wills are known in which sums were bequeathed to a Norwich anchoress named Julian, and an account by the celebrated mystic Margery Kempe exists which provides evidence of counsel Kempe was given by the anchoress.

Details of Julian's family, education, or of her life before becoming an anchoress are not known; it is unclear whether her actual name was Julian. Preferring to write anonymously, and seeking isolation from the world, she was nevertheless influential in her lifetime. While her writings were carefully preserved, the Reformation prevented their publication in print. The Long Text was first published in 1670 by the Benedictine monk Serenus de Cressy, reissued by George Hargreaves Parker in 1843, and published in a modernised version in 1864. Julian's writings emerged from obscurity in 1901 when a manuscript in the British Museum was transcribed and published with notes by Grace Warrack; many translations have been made since. Julian is today considered to be an important Christian mystic and theologian.

Background
The English city of Norwich, where Julian probably lived all her life, was second in importance to London during the 13th and 14th centuries, and the centre of the country's primary region for agriculture and trade. During her lifetime, the Black Death reached Norwich; the disease may have killed over half the population of the city, and returned in subsequent outbreaks up to 1387. Julian was alive during the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, when the city was overwhelmed by rebel forces led by Geoffrey Litster. Henry le Despenser, the Bishop of Norwich, executed Litster after the peasant army was defeated at the Battle of North Walsham. Despenser zealously opposed the Lollards, who advocated reform of the Church, and some of them were burnt at the stake at Lollards Pit, just outside the city.

Norwich may have been one of the most religious cities in Europe at that time, with its cathedral, friaries, churches and recluses' cells dominating both the landscape and the lives of its citizens. On the eastern side of the city was the cathedral priory (founded in 1096), the Benedictine Hospital of St Paul, the Carmelite friary, St Giles's Hospital, and the Greyfriars monastery. To the south, the priory at Carrow, a Benedictine foundation, was located just beyond the city walls. Its income was mainly generated from "livings" acquired from the renting of its assets, which included the Norwich churches of St Julian, All Saints Timberhill, St Edward Conisford and St Catherine Newgate, all now lost apart from St Julian's. The churches with anchorite cells enhanced the reputation of the priory, as they attracted endowments from across society.

Sources for Julian's life
Little of Julian's life is known. The few scant comments she provided about herself are contained in her writings, later published in a book commonly known as Revelations of Divine Love, a title first used in 1670. The earliest surviving copy of a manuscript of Julian's, made by a scribe in the 1470s, acknowledges her as the author of the work.

The earliest known references to Julian come from four wills, in which she is described as being an anchoress. The wills were all made by individuals who lived in Norwich. Roger Reed, the rector of St Michael Coslany, Norwich, whose will of 20March 1394 provides the earliest record of Julian's existence, made a bequest of 12shillings to be paid to "Julian anakorite". Thomas Edmund, a Chantry priest from Aylsham, stipulated in his will of 19May 1404 that 12pennies be given to "Julian, anchoress of the church of St Julian, Conisford" and 8 pennies to "Sarah, living with her". John Plumpton from Norwich gave 40 pennies to "the anchoress in the church of St Julian's, Conisford, and a shilling each to her maid and her former maid Alice" in his will dated 24November 1415. The fourth person to mention Julian was Isabelle, Countess of Suffolk (the second wife of William de Ufford, 2nd Earl of Suffolk), who made a bequest of 20shillings to "Julian reclus a Norwich" in her will dated 26 September 1416. As a bequest to an unnamed anchorite at St Julian's was made in 1429, there is a possibility Julian was alive at this time.

Julian was known as a spiritual authority within her community, where she also served as an adviser. In around 1414, when she was in her seventies, she was visited by the English mystic Margery Kempe. The Book of Margery Kempe, which is possibly the first autobiography to be written in English, mentions that Kempe travelled to Norwich to obtain spiritual advice from Julian, saying she was "bidden by Our Lord" to go to "Dame Jelyan ... for the anchoress was expert in" divine revelations, "and good counsel could give". Kempe never referred to Julian as an author, although she was familiar with the works of other spiritual writers, and mentioned them.

Visions
Julian wrote in Revelations of Divine Love that she became seriously ill at the age of 30. She could have been an anchoress when she fell ill, although it is possible she was a lay person living at home, as she was visited by her mother and other people, and the rules of enclosure for an anchoress would not normally have allowed outsiders such access. On 8May 1373 a curate administered the last rites of the Church to her, in anticipation of her death. As he held a crucifix above the foot of her bed, she began to lose her sight and feel physically numb, but gazing on the crucifix she saw the figure of Jesus begin to bleed. Over the next several hours, she had a series of 15 visions of Jesus, and a 16th the following night.

Julian completely recovered from her illness on 13May; there is general agreement that she wrote about her shewings shortly after she experienced them. Her original manuscript no longer exists, but a copy, now known as the Short Text, survived. Decades later, perhaps in the early 1390s, she began a theological exploration of the meaning of her visions, and produced writings now known as The Long Text. This second work seems to have gone through many revisions before it was finished, perhaps in the 1410s or 1420s. Julian's revelations seem to be the first important example of a vision by an Englishwoman for 200 years, in contrast with the Continent, where "a golden age of women's mysticism" occurred during the 13th and 14th centuries.

Personal life
The few autobiographical details Julian included in the Short Text, including her gender, were suppressed when she wrote her longer text later in life. Historians are not even sure of her actual name. It is generally thought to be taken from the church in Norwich to which her cell was attached, but Julian was also used in its own right as a girl's name in the Middle Ages, and so could have been her Christian name.

Julian's writings indicate that she was born in 1343 or late 1342, and died after 1416. She was six when the Black Death arrived in Norwich. It has been speculated that she was educated as a young girl by the Benedictine nuns of Carrow Abbey, as a school for girls existed there during her childhood. There is no written evidence that she was ever a nun at Carrow.

According to several commentators, including Santha Bhattacharji in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Julian's discussion of the maternal nature of God suggests that she knew of motherhood from her own experience of bringing up children. As plague epidemics were rampant during the 14th century, it has been suggested that Julian may have lost her own family as a result. By becoming an anchoress she would have been kept in quarantine away from the rest of the population of Norwich. However, nothing in Julian's writings provides any indication of the plagues, religious conflict, or civil insurrection that occurred in the city during her lifetime. Kenneth Leech and Sister Benedicta Ward, the joint authors of Julian Reconsidered (1988), concluded that she was a young widowed mother and never a nun. They based their opinion on a dearth of references about her occupation in life and a lack of evidence to connect her with Carrow Abbey, which would have honoured her and buried her in the grounds had she been strongly connected with the priory.

Life as an anchoress
Julian was an anchoress from at least the 1390s. Living in her cell, she would have played an important part within her community, devoting herself to a life of prayer to complement the clergy in their primary function as protectors of souls. Her solitary life would have begun after the completion of an onerous selection process. An important church ceremony would have taken place at St Julian's Church, in the presence of the bishop. During the ceremony, psalms from the Office of the Dead would have been sung for Julian (as if it were her funeral), and at some point she would have been led to her cell door and into the room beyond. The door would afterwards have been sealed up, and she would have remained in her cell for the rest of her life.

Once her life of seclusion had begun, Julian would have had to follow the strict rules laid down for anchoresses. Two important sources of information about the life of such women have survived. De institutione inclusarum was written in Latin by Ælred of Rieveaulx in around 1162, and the Ancrene Riwle was written in Middle English in around 1200. Originally made for three sisters, the Ancrene Riwle became in time a manual for all female recluses. The work regained its former popularity during the mystical movement of the 14th century. It may have been available to Julian to read and become familiar with—being a book written in a language she could read. The book stipulated that anchoresses should live in confined isolation, in poverty, and under a vow of chastity. The popular image of Julian living with her cat for company stems from the regulations set out in the Ancrene Riwle.

As an anchoress living in the heart of an urban environment, Julian would not have been entirely secluded. She would have enjoyed the financial support of the more prosperous members of the local community, as well as the general affection of the population. She would have in turn provided prayers and given advice to visitors, serving as an example of devout holiness. According to one edition of the Cambridge Medieval History, it is possible that she met the English mystic Walter Hilton, who died when Julian was in her fifties, and who may have influenced her writings in a small way.

Revelations of Divine Love
Both the Long Text and Short Text of Julian's Revelations of Divine Love contain an account of each of her revelations. Her writings are unique, as they are the earliest surviving English language works by a woman, although it is possible that some anonymous works may have had female authors. They are also the only surviving writings by an English anchoress. The Long Text consists of 86 chapters and about 63,500 words, and is about six times longer than the Short Text.

In 14th century England, when women were generally barred from high status positions, their knowledge of Latin would have been limited, and it is more likely that they read and wrote in English. The historian Janina Ramirez has suggested that by choosing to write in her vernacular language, a precedent set by other medieval writers, Julian was "attempting to express the inexpressible" in the best way possible. Nothing written by Julian was ever mentioned in any bequests, nor written for a specific readership, or influenced other medieval authors, and almost no references were made to her writings from the time they were written until the beginning of the 20th century.

Julian's writings were largely unknown until 1670, when they were published under the title XVI Revelations of Divine Love, shewed to a devout servant of Our Lord, called Mother Juliana, an Anchorete of Norwich: Who lived in the Dayes of King Edward the Third by Serenus de Cressy, a confessor for the English nuns at Cambrai. Cressy based his book on the Long Text, probably written by Julian in the 1410s or 1420s. Three manuscript copies of the Long Text have survived. One copy of the complete Long Text, known as the Paris Manuscript, resides in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, and two other manuscripts are now in the British Library in London. One of the manuscripts was perhaps copied out by Dame Clementina Cary, who founded the English Benedictine monastery in Paris. Cressy's edition was reprinted in 1843 and 1864, and again in 1902.

A new version of the book was produced by Henry Collins in 1877. It became still better known after the publication of Grace Warrack's 1901 edition, which included modernised language, as well as, according to the author Georgia Ronan Crampton, a "sympathetic informed introduction". The book introduced most early 20th century readers to Julian's writings; according to the historian Henrietta Leyser, Julian was "beloved in the 20th century by theologians and poets alike".

Julian's shorter work, now known as the Short Text, was probably written not long after her visions in May 1373. As with the Long Text, the original manuscript was lost, but not before at least one copy was made by a scribe. It was in the possession of an English Catholic family at one point. The copy was seen and described by the antiquarian Francis Blomefield in 1745. After disappearing from view for 150 years, it was found in 1910, in a collection of contemplative medieval texts bought by the British Museum, and was published by the Reverend Dundas Harford in 1911. Now part of British Library Add MS 37790, the manuscript—with Julian's Short Text of 33 pages (folios 97r to 115r)—is held in the British Library.

Theology
Julian of Norwich is now recognised as one of England's most important mystics; according to Leyser, she was the greatest English anchoress. For the theologian Denys Turner the core issue Julian addresses in Revelations of Divine Love is "the problem of sin". Julian says that sin is behovely, which is often translated as "necessary", "appropriate", or "fitting".

Julian lived in a time of turmoil, but her theology was optimistic and spoke of God's omnibenevolence and love in terms of joy and compassion. Revelations of Divine Love "contains a message of optimism based on the certainty of being loved by God and of being protected by his Providence".

A characteristic element of Julian's mystical theology was her equating divine love with motherly love, a theme found in the Biblical prophets, as in Isaiah 49:15. According to Julian, God is both our mother and our father. As the medievalist Caroline Walker Bynum shows, this idea was also developed by Bernard of Clairvaux and others from the 12thcentury onward. Bynum regards the medieval notion of Jesus as a mother as being a metaphor rather than a literal belief. In her fourteenth revelation, Julian writes of the Trinity in domestic terms, comparing Jesus to a mother who is wise, loving and merciful. Author Frances Beer asserted that Julian believed that the maternal aspect of Christ was literal and not metaphoric: Christ is not like a mother, he is literally the mother. Julian emphasised this by explaining how the bond between mother and child is the only earthly relationship that comes close to the relationship a person can have with Jesus. She used metaphors when writing about Jesus in relation to ideas about conceiving, giving birth, weaning and upbringing.

Julian wrote, "For I saw no wrath except on man's side, and He forgives that in us, for wrath is nothing else but a perversity and an opposition to peace and to love." She wrote that God sees us as perfect and waits for the day when human souls mature so that evil and sin will no longer hinder us, and that "God is nearer to us than our own soul". This theme is repeated throughout her work: "Jesus answered with these words, saying: 'All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.' ... This was said so tenderly, without blame of any kind toward me or anybody else."

Her status as an anchoress may have prevented contemporary monastic and university authorities from challenging her theology. A lack of references to her work during her own time may indicate that she kept her writings with her in her cell, so that religious authorities were unaware of them. The 14th-century English cardinal Adam Easton's Defensorium sanctae birgittae, Alfonso of Jaen's Epistola Solitarii, and the English mystic William Flete's Remedies against Temptations, are all referenced in Julian's text.

Commemoration
Julian is remembered in the Church of England with a Lesser Festival on 8 May. The Episcopal Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the United States also commemorate her on 8 May.

Although not canonised in the Catholic Church or listed in the Roman Martyrology, Julian is quoted in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. In 1997, Father Giandomenico Mucci listed Julian among 18 individuals who are considered potential Doctors of the Church, describing her as a beata.

Pope Benedict XVI discussed the life and teaching of Julian at a General Audience on 1 December 2010, stating: "Julian of Norwich understood the central message for spiritual life: God is love and it is only if one opens oneself to this love, totally and with total trust, and lets it become one's sole guide in life, that all things are transfigured, true peace and true joy found and one is able to radiate it." He concluded: "'And all will be well,' 'all manner of things shall be well': this is the final message that Julian of Norwich transmits to us and that I am also proposing to you today."

Legacy
The 20th- and 21st-century revival of interest in Julian has been associated with a renewed interest in Christian contemplation in the English-speaking world. The Julian Meetings, an association of contemplative prayer groups, takes its name from her, but is unaffiliated to any faith doctrine, and is unconnected with Julian's theology, although her writings are sometimes used in meetings.

St Julian's Church
There were no hermits or anchorites in Norwich from 1312 until the emergence of Julian in the 1370s. St Julian's Church, located off King Street in the south of Norwich city centre, holds regular services. The building, which has a round tower, is one of the 31 parish churches from a total of 58 that once existed in Norwich during the Middle Ages, of which 36 had an anchorite cell.

The cell did not remain empty after Julian's death. In 1428 Julian(a) Lampett (or Lampit) moved in when Edith Wilton was the prioress responsible for the church, and remained in the cell until 1478 when Margaret Pygot was prioress. The cell continued to be used by anchorites until the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s, when it was demolished and the church stripped of its rood screen and statues. No rector was appointed from then until 1581.

By 1845 St Julian's was in a poor state of repair and the east wall collapsed that year. After an appeal for funds, the church was restored. The church underwent further restoration during the first half of the 20th century, but was destroyed during the Norwich Blitz of June 1942 when the tower received a direct hit. After the war, the church was rebuilt. It now appears largely as it was before its destruction, although its tower is much reduced in height and a chapel has been built in place of the long-lost anchorite cell.

Literature
The Catechism of the Catholic Church quotes from Revelations of Divine Love in its explanation of how God can draw a greater good, even from evil. The poet T. S. Eliot incorporated "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well" three times into his poem "Little Gidding", the fourth of his Four Quartets (1943), as well as Julian's "the ground of our beseeching". The poem renewed the English-speaking public's awareness of Julian's texts. And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well When the tongues of flames are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one.

— T. S. Eliot Four Quartets Little Gidding

Sydney Carter's song "All Shall Be Well" (sometimes called "The Bells of Norwich"), which uses words by Julian, was published in 1982. Julian's writings have been translated into numerous languages.

In 2023 Julian was the subject of the fictional autobiography I, Julian by Dr Claire Gilbert, Visiting Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge. Gilbert discussed her book on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour on 8 May 2023.

Victoria MacKenzie's For Thy Great Pain Have Mercy On My Little Pain, also published in 2023, concerns both Julian and Margery Kempe.

Norfolk and Norwich
In 2013 the University of East Anglia honoured Julian by naming its new study centre the Julian Study Centre. Norwich's first Julian Week was held in May 2013. The celebration included concerts, talks, and free events held throughout the city, with the stated aim of encouraging people "to learn about Julian and her artistic, historical and theological significance".

The Lady Julian Bridge, crossing the River Wensum and linking King Street and the Riverside Walk close to Norwich railway station, was named in honour of the anchoress. An example of a swing bridge, built to allow larger vessels to approach a basin further upstream, it was designed by the Mott MacDonald Group and completed in 2009.

During 2023, the Friends of Julian of Norwich organized a series of events, centred around 8 May, the 650th anniversary of the occurrence of Julian's revelations.

Long Text

 * Westminster Cathedral Treasury MS 4 (W), a late 15th or early 16th century manuscript. It includes extracts from Julian's Long Text, as well as selections from the writings of the English mystic Walter Hilton. The manuscript is on loan to Westminster Abbey's Muniments Room and Library.
 * Westminster Cathedral Treasury MS 4 (W), a late 15th or early 16th century manuscript. It includes extracts from Julian's Long Text, as well as selections from the writings of the English mystic Walter Hilton. The manuscript is on loan to Westminster Abbey's Muniments Room and Library.
 * Westminster Cathedral Treasury MS 4 (W), a late 15th or early 16th century manuscript. It includes extracts from Julian's Long Text, as well as selections from the writings of the English mystic Walter Hilton. The manuscript is on loan to Westminster Abbey's Muniments Room and Library.
 * Westminster Cathedral Treasury MS 4 (W), a late 15th or early 16th century manuscript. It includes extracts from Julian's Long Text, as well as selections from the writings of the English mystic Walter Hilton. The manuscript is on loan to Westminster Abbey's Muniments Room and Library.

Selected editions

 * (The second edition (1907) is available online from the Internet Archive.)
 * (The second edition (1907) is available online from the Internet Archive.)
 * (The second edition (1907) is available online from the Internet Archive.)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Julian of Norwich


text:
Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) was an American naturalist, essayist, poet, and philosopher. A leading transcendentalist, he is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay "Civil Disobedience" (originally published as "Resistance to Civil Government"), an argument in favor of citizen disobedience against an unjust state.

Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry amount to more than 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions are his writings on natural history and philosophy, in which he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern-day environmentalism. His literary style interweaves close observation of nature, personal experience, pointed rhetoric, symbolic meanings, and historical lore, while displaying a poetic sensibility, philosophical austerity, and attention to practical detail. He was also deeply interested in the idea of survival in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay; at the same time he advocated abandoning waste and illusion in order to discover life's true essential needs.

Thoreau was a lifelong abolitionist, delivering lectures that attacked the fugitive slave law while praising the writings of Wendell Phillips and defending the abolitionist John Brown. Thoreau's philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced the political thoughts and actions of notable figures such as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.

Thoreau is sometimes referred to as an anarchist. In "Civil Disobedience", Thoreau wrote: "I heartily accept the motto,—'That government is best which governs least;' and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe,—'That government is best which governs not at all;' and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.... But, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government."

Pronunciation of his name
Amos Bronson Alcott and Thoreau's aunt each wrote that "Thoreau" is pronounced like the word thorough ( —in General American, but more precisely  —in 19th-century New England). Edward Waldo Emerson wrote that the name should be pronounced "Thó-row", with the h sounded and stress on the first syllable. Among modern-day American English speakers, it is perhaps more commonly pronounced —with stress on the second syllable.

Physical appearance
Thoreau had a distinctive appearance, with a nose that he called his "most prominent feature". Of his appearance and disposition, Ellery Channing wrote: "His face, once seen, could not be forgotten. The features were quite marked: the nose aquiline or very Roman, like one of the portraits of Caesar (more like a beak, as was said); large overhanging brows above the deepest set blue eyes that could be seen, in certain lights, and in others gray,—eyes expressive of all shades of feeling, but never weak or near-sighted; the forehead not unusually broad or high, full of concentrated energy and purpose; the mouth with prominent lips, pursed up with meaning and thought when silent, and giving out when open with the most varied and unusual instructive sayings."

Early life and education, 1817–1837

Henry David Thoreau was born David Henry Thoreau in Concord, Massachusetts, into the "modest New England family" of John Thoreau, a pencil maker, and Cynthia Dunbar. His father was of French Protestant descent. His paternal grandfather had been born on the UK crown dependency island of Jersey. His maternal grandfather, Asa Dunbar, led Harvard's 1766 student "Butter Rebellion", the first recorded student protest in the American colonies. David Henry was named after his recently deceased paternal uncle, David Thoreau. He began to call himself Henry David after he finished college; he never petitioned to make a legal name change.

He had two older siblings, Helen and John Jr., and a younger sister, Sophia Thoreau. None of the children married. Helen (1812–1849) died at age 37, from tuberculosis. John Jr. (1814–1842) died at age 27, of tetanus after cutting himself while shaving. Henry David (1817–1862) died at age 44, of tuberculosis. Sophia (1819–1876) survived him by 14 years, dying at age 56, of tuberculosis.

He studied at Harvard College between 1833 and 1837. He lived in Hollis Hall and took courses in rhetoric, classics, philosophy, mathematics, and science. He was a member of the Institute of 1770 (now the Hasty Pudding Club). According to legend, Thoreau refused to pay the five-dollar fee (approximately ) for a Harvard master's diploma, which he described thus: Harvard College offered it to graduates "who proved their physical worth by being alive three years after graduating, and their saving, earning, or inheriting quality or condition by having Five Dollars to give the college". He commented, "Let every sheep keep its own skin", a reference to the tradition of using sheepskin vellum for diplomas.

Thoreau's birthplace still exists on Virginia Road in Concord. The house has been restored by the Thoreau Farm Trust, a nonprofit organization, and is now open to the public.

Return to Concord, 1837–1844
The traditional professions open to college graduates—law, the church, business, medicine—did not interest Thoreau, so in 1835 he took a leave of absence from Harvard, during which he taught at a school in Canton, Massachusetts, living for two years at an earlier version of today's Colonial Inn in Concord. His grandfather owned the earliest of the three buildings that were later combined. After he graduated in 1837, Thoreau joined the faculty of the Concord public school, but he resigned after a few weeks rather than administer corporal punishment. He and his brother John then opened the Concord Academy, a grammar school in Concord, in 1838. They introduced several progressive concepts, including nature walks and visits to local shops and businesses. The school closed when John became fatally ill from tetanus in 1842 after cutting himself while shaving. He died in Henry's arms.

Upon graduation Thoreau returned home to Concord, where he met Ralph Waldo Emerson through a mutual friend. Emerson, who was 14 years his senior, took a paternal and at times patron-like interest in Thoreau, advising the young man and introducing him to a circle of local writers and thinkers, including Ellery Channing, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, and Nathaniel Hawthorne and his son Julian Hawthorne, who was a boy at the time.

Emerson urged Thoreau to contribute essays and poems to a quarterly periodical, The Dial, and lobbied the editor, Margaret Fuller, to publish those writings. Thoreau's first essay published in The Dial was "Aulus Persius Flaccus", an essay on the Roman poet and satirist, in July 1840. It consisted of revised passages from his journal, which he had begun keeping at Emerson's suggestion. The first journal entry, on October 22, 1837, reads, What are you doing now?' he asked. 'Do you keep a journal?' So I make my first entry to-day."

Thoreau was a philosopher of nature and its relation to the human condition. In his early years he followed transcendentalism, a loose and eclectic idealist philosophy advocated by Emerson, Fuller, and Alcott. They held that an ideal spiritual state transcends, or goes beyond, the physical and empirical, and that one achieves that insight via personal intuition rather than religious doctrine. In their view, Nature is the outward sign of inward spirit, expressing the "radical correspondence of visible things and human thoughts", as Emerson wrote in Nature (1836).

On April 18, 1841, Thoreau moved in with the Emersons. There, from 1841 to 1844, he served as the children's tutor; he was also an editorial assistant, repairman and gardener. For a few months in 1843, he moved to the home of William Emerson on Staten Island, and tutored the family's sons while seeking contacts among literary men and journalists in the city who might help publish his writings, including his future literary representative Horace Greeley.

Thoreau returned to Concord and worked in his family's pencil factory, which he would continue to do alongside his writing and other work for most of his adult life. He resurrected the process of making good pencils with inferior graphite by using clay as a binder. The process of mixing graphite and clay, known as the Conté process, had been first patented by Nicolas-Jacques Conté in 1795. Thoreau made profitable use of a graphite source found in New Hampshire that had been purchased in 1821 by his uncle, Charles Dunbar. The company's other source of graphite had been Tantiusques, a mine operated by Native Americans in Sturbridge, Massachusetts. Later, Thoreau converted the pencil factory to produce plumbago, a name for graphite at the time, which was used in the electrotyping process.

Once back in Concord, Thoreau went through a restless period. In April 1844 he and his friend Edward Hoar accidentally set a fire that consumed 300 acre of Walden Woods.

"Civil Disobedience" and the Walden years, 1845–1850

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion."

Thoreau felt a need to concentrate and work more on his writing. In 1845, Ellery Channing told Thoreau, "Go out upon that, build yourself a hut, & there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no other alternative, no other hope for you." Thus, on July 4, 1845, Thoreau embarked on a two-year experiment in simple living, moving to a small house he had built on land owned by Emerson in a second growth forest around the shores of Walden Pond, having had a request to build a hut on Flints Pond, near that of his friend Charles Stearns Wheeler, denied by the landowners due to the Fairhaven Bay incident. The house was in "a pretty pasture and woodlot" of 14 acre that Emerson had bought, 1+1/2 mi from his family home. Whilst there, he wrote his only extended piece of literary criticism, "Thomas Carlyle and His Works".

On July 24 or July 25, 1846, Thoreau ran into the local tax collector, Sam Staples, who asked him to pay six years of delinquent poll taxes. Thoreau refused because of his opposition to the Mexican–American War and slavery, and he spent a night in jail because of this refusal. The next day Thoreau was freed when someone, likely to have been his aunt, paid the tax, against his wishes. The experience had a strong impact on Thoreau. In January and February 1848, he delivered lectures on "The Rights and Duties of the Individual in relation to Government", explaining his tax resistance at the Concord Lyceum. Bronson Alcott attended the lecture, writing in his journal on January 26:

"Heard Thoreau's lecture before the Lyceum on the relation of the individual to the State—an admirable statement of the rights of the individual to self-government, and an attentive audience. His allusions to the Mexican War, to Mr. Hoar's expulsion from Carolina, his own imprisonment in Concord Jail for refusal to pay his tax, Mr. Hoar's payment of mine when taken to prison for a similar refusal, were all pertinent, well considered, and reasoned. I took great pleasure in this deed of Thoreau's."

Thoreau revised the lecture into an essay titled "Resistance to Civil Government" (also known as "Civil Disobedience"). It was published by Elizabeth Peabody in the Aesthetic Papers in May 1849. Thoreau had taken up a version of Percy Shelley's principle in the political poem "The Mask of Anarchy" (1819), which begins with the powerful images of the unjust forms of authority of his time and then imagines the stirrings of a radically new form of social action.

At Walden Pond, Thoreau completed a first draft of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, an elegy to his brother John, describing their trip to the White Mountains in 1839. Thoreau did not find a publisher for the book and instead printed 1,000 copies at his own expense; fewer than 300 were sold. He self-published on the advice of Emerson, using Emerson's publisher, Munroe, who did little to publicize the book.

In August 1846, Thoreau briefly left Walden to make a trip to Mount Katahdin in Maine, a journey later recorded in "Ktaadn", the first part of The Maine Woods.

Thoreau left Walden Pond on September 6, 1847. At Emerson's request, he immediately moved back to the Emerson house to help Emerson's wife, Lidian, manage the household while her husband was on an extended trip to Europe. Over several years, as he worked to pay off his debts, he continuously revised the manuscript of what he eventually published as Walden, or Life in the Woods in 1854, recounting the two years, two months, and two days he had spent at Walden Pond. The book compresses that time into a single calendar year, using the passage of the four seasons to symbolize human development. Part memoir and part spiritual quest, Walden at first won few admirers, but later critics have regarded it as a classic American work that explores natural simplicity, harmony, and beauty as models for just social and cultural conditions.

The American poet Robert Frost wrote of Thoreau, "In one book ... he surpasses everything we have had in America."

The American author John Updike said of the book, "A century and a half after its publication, Walden has become such a totem of the back-to-nature, preservationist, anti-business, civil-disobedience mindset, and Thoreau so vivid a protester, so perfect a crank and hermit saint, that the book risks being as revered and unread as the Bible."

Thoreau moved out of Emerson's house in July 1848 and stayed at a house on nearby Belknap Street. In 1850, he moved into a house at 255 Main Street, where he lived until his death.

In the summer of 1850, Thoreau and Channing journeyed from Boston to Montreal and Quebec City. These would be Thoreau's only travels outside the United States. It is as a result of this trip that he developed lectures that eventually became A Yankee in Canada. He jested that all he got from this adventure "was a cold". In fact, this proved an opportunity to contrast American civic spirit and democratic values with a colony apparently ruled by illegitimate religious and military power. Whereas his own country had had its revolution, in Canada history had failed to turn.

Later years, 1851–1862
In 1851, Thoreau became increasingly fascinated with natural history and narratives of travel and expedition. He read avidly on botany and often wrote observations on this topic into his journal. He admired William Bartram and Charles Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle. He kept detailed observations on Concord's nature lore, recording everything from how the fruit ripened over time to the fluctuating depths of Walden Pond and the days certain birds migrated. The point of this task was to "anticipate" the seasons of nature, in his word.

He became a land surveyor and continued to write increasingly detailed observations on the natural history of the town, covering an area of 26 sqmi, in his journal, a two-million-word document he kept for 24 years. He also kept a series of notebooks, and these observations became the source of his late writings on natural history, such as "Autumnal Tints", "The Succession of Trees", and "Wild Apples", an essay lamenting the destruction of the local wild apple species.

With the rise of environmental history and ecocriticism as academic disciplines, several new readings of Thoreau began to emerge, showing him to have been both a philosopher and an analyst of ecological patterns in fields and woodlots. For instance, "The Succession of Forest Trees", shows that he used experimentation and analysis to explain how forests regenerate after fire or human destruction, through the dispersal of seeds by winds or animals. In this lecture, first presented to a cattle show in Concord, and considered his greatest contribution to ecology, Thoreau explained why one species of tree can grow in a place where a different tree did previously. He observed that squirrels often carry nuts far from the tree from which they fell to create stashes. These seeds are likely to germinate and grow should the squirrel die or abandon the stash. He credited the squirrel for performing a "great service ... in the economy of the universe."

He traveled to Canada East once, Cape Cod four times, and Maine three times; these landscapes inspired his "excursion" books, A Yankee in Canada, Cape Cod, and The Maine Woods, in which travel itineraries frame his thoughts about geography, history and philosophy. Other travels took him southwest to Philadelphia and New York City in 1854 and west across the Great Lakes region in 1861, when he visited Niagara Falls, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Mackinac Island. He was provincial in his own travels, but he read widely about travel in other lands. He devoured all the first-hand travel accounts available in his day, at a time when the last unmapped regions of the earth were being explored. He read Magellan and James Cook; the arctic explorers John Franklin, Alexander Mackenzie and William Parry; David Livingstone and Richard Francis Burton on Africa; Lewis and Clark; and hundreds of lesser-known works by explorers and literate travelers. Astonishing amounts of reading fed his endless curiosity about the peoples, cultures, religions and natural history of the world and left its traces as commentaries in his voluminous journals. He processed everything he read, in the local laboratory of his Concord experience. Among his famous aphorisms is his advice to "live at home like a traveler".

After John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, many prominent voices in the abolitionist movement distanced themselves from Brown or damned him with faint praise. Thoreau was disgusted by this, and he composed a key speech, A Plea for Captain John Brown, which was uncompromising in its defense of Brown and his actions. Thoreau's speech proved persuasive: the abolitionist movement began to accept Brown as a martyr, and by the time of the American Civil War entire armies of the North were literally singing Brown's praises. As a biographer of Brown put it, "If, as Alfred Kazin suggests, without John Brown there would have been no Civil War, we would add that without the Concord Transcendentalists, John Brown would have had little cultural impact."

Death
Thoreau contracted tuberculosis in 1835 and suffered from it sporadically afterwards. In 1860, following a late-night excursion to count the rings of tree stumps during a rainstorm, he became ill with bronchitis. His health declined, with brief periods of remission, and he eventually became bedridden. Recognizing the terminal nature of his disease, Thoreau spent his last years revising and editing his unpublished works, particularly The Maine Woods and Excursions, and petitioning publishers to print revised editions of A Week and Walden. He wrote letters and journal entries until he became too weak to continue. His friends were alarmed at his diminished appearance and were fascinated by his tranquil acceptance of death. When his aunt Louisa asked him in his last weeks if he had made his peace with God, Thoreau responded, "I did not know we had ever quarreled."

Aware he was dying, Thoreau's last words were "Now comes good sailing", followed by two lone words, "moose" and "Indian". He died on May 6, 1862, at age 44. Amos Bronson Alcott planned the service and read selections from Thoreau's works, and Channing presented a hymn. Emerson wrote the eulogy spoken at the funeral. Thoreau was buried in the Dunbar family plot; his remains and those of members of his immediate family were eventually moved to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts.

Nature and human existence
"Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind."

Thoreau was an early advocate of recreational hiking and canoeing, of conserving natural resources on private land, and of preserving wilderness as public land. He was himself a highly skilled canoeist; Nathaniel Hawthorne, after a ride with him, noted that "Mr. Thoreau managed the boat so perfectly, either with two paddles or with one, that it seemed instinct with his own will, and to require no physical effort to guide it."

He was not a strict vegetarian, though he said he preferred that diet and advocated it as a means of self-improvement. He wrote in Walden, "The practical objection to animal food in my case was its uncleanness; and besides, when I had caught and cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me essentially. It was insignificant and unnecessary, and cost more than it came to. A little bread or a few potatoes would have done as well, with less trouble and filth."

Thoreau neither rejected civilization nor fully embraced wilderness. Instead he sought a middle ground, the pastoral realm that integrates nature and culture. His philosophy required that he be a didactic arbitrator between the wilderness he based so much on and the spreading mass of humanity in North America. He decried the latter endlessly but felt that a teacher needs to be close to those who needed to hear what he wanted to tell them. The wildness he enjoyed was the nearby swamp or forest, and he preferred "partially cultivated country". His idea of being "far in the recesses of the wilderness" of Maine was to "travel the logger's path and the Indian trail", but he also hiked on pristine land. In the essay "Henry David Thoreau, Philosopher" Roderick Nash wrote, "Thoreau left Concord in 1846 for the first of three trips to northern Maine. His expectations were high because he hoped to find genuine, primeval America. But contact with real wilderness in Maine affected him far differently than had the idea of wilderness in Concord. Instead of coming out of the woods with a deepened appreciation of the wilds, Thoreau felt a greater respect for civilization and realized the necessity of balance."

Of alcohol, Thoreau wrote, "I would fain keep sober always. ... I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man; wine is not so noble a liquor. ... Of all ebriosity, who does not prefer to be intoxicated by the air he breathes?"

Sexuality
Thoreau never married and was childless. In 1840, when he was 23, he proposed to eighteen-year old Ellen Sewall, but she refused him, on the advice of her father. Sophia Foord proposed to him, but he rejected her.

Thoreau's sexuality has long been the subject of speculation, including by his contemporaries. Critics have called him heterosexual, homosexual, or asexual. There is no evidence to suggest he had physical relations with anyone, man or woman. Some scholars have suggested that homoerotic sentiments run through his writings and concluded that he was homosexual. The elegy "Sympathy" was inspired by the eleven-year-old Edmund Sewall, who had just spent five days in the Thoreau household in 1839. One scholar has suggested that he wrote the poem to Edmund because he could not bring himself to write it to Edmund's sister Anna, and another that Thoreau's "emotional experiences with women are memorialized under a camouflage of masculine pronouns", but other scholars dismiss this. It has been argued that the long paean in Walden to the French-Canadian woodchopper Alek Therien, which includes allusions to Achilles and Patroclus, is an expression of conflicted desire. In some of Thoreau's writing there is the sense of a secret self. In 1840 he writes in his journal: "My friend is the apology for my life. In him are the spaces which my orbit traverses". Thoreau was strongly influenced by the moral reformers of his time, and this may have instilled anxiety and guilt over sexual desire.

Politics

Thoreau was fervently against slavery and actively supported the abolitionist movement. He participated as a conductor in the Underground Railroad, delivered lectures that attacked the Fugitive Slave Law, and in opposition to the popular opinion of the time, supported radical abolitionist militia leader John Brown and his party. Two weeks after the ill-fated raid on Harpers Ferry and in the weeks leading up to Brown's execution, Thoreau delivered a speech to the citizens of Concord, Massachusetts, in which he compared the American government to Pontius Pilate and likened Brown's execution to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ:

"Some eighteen hundred years ago Christ was crucified; this morning, perchance, Captain Brown was hung. These are the two ends of a chain which is not without its links. He is not Old Brown any longer; he is an angel of light."

In The Last Days of John Brown, Thoreau described the words and deeds of John Brown as noble and an example of heroism. In addition, he lamented the newspaper editors who dismissed Brown and his scheme as "crazy".

Thoreau was a proponent of limited government and individualism. Although he was hopeful that mankind could potentially have, through self-betterment, the kind of government which "governs not at all", he distanced himself from contemporary "no-government men" (anarchists), writing: "I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government."

Thoreau deemed the evolution from absolute monarchy to limited monarchy to democracy as "a progress toward true respect for the individual" and theorized about further improvements "towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man". Echoing this belief, he went on to write: "There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly."

It is on this basis that Thoreau could so strongly inveigh against the British administration and Catholicism in A Yankee in Canada. Despotic authority, Thoreau argued, had crushed the people's sense of ingenuity and enterprise; the Canadian habitants had been reduced, in his view, to a perpetual childlike state. Ignoring the recent rebellions, he argued that there would be no revolution in the St. Lawrence River valley.

Although Thoreau believed resistance to unjustly exercised authority could be both violent (exemplified in his support for John Brown) and nonviolent (his own example of tax resistance displayed in Resistance to Civil Government), he regarded pacifist nonresistance as temptation to passivity, writing: "Let not our Peace be proclaimed by the rust on our swords, or our inability to draw them from their scabbards; but let her at least have so much work on her hands as to keep those swords bright and sharp." Furthermore, in a formal lyceum debate in 1841, he debated the subject "Is it ever proper to offer forcible resistance?", arguing the affirmative.

Likewise, his condemnation of the Mexican–American War did not stem from pacifism, but rather because he considered Mexico "unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army" as a means to expand the slave territory.

Thoreau was ambivalent towards industrialization and capitalism. On one hand he regarded commerce as "unexpectedly confident and serene, adventurous, and unwearied" and expressed admiration for its associated cosmopolitanism, writing:

"I am refreshed and expanded when the freight train rattles past me, and I smell the stores which go dispensing their odors all the way from Long Wharf to Lake Champlain, reminding me of foreign parts, of coral reefs, and Indian oceans, and tropical climes, and the extent of the globe. I feel more like a citizen of the world at the sight of the palm-leaf which will cover so many flaxen New England heads the next summer"

On the other hand, he wrote disparagingly of the factory system:

"I cannot believe that our factory system is the best mode by which men may get clothing. The condition of the operatives is becoming every day more like that of the English; and it cannot be wondered at, since, as far as I have heard or observed, the principal object is, not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that the corporations may be enriched."

Thoreau also favored the protection of animals and wild areas, free trade, and taxation for schools and highways, and espoused views that at least in part align with what is today known as bioregionalism. He disapproved of the subjugation of Native Americans, slavery, philistinism, technological utopianism, and what can be regarded in today's terms as consumerism, mass entertainment, and frivolous applications of technology.

Indian sacred texts and philosophy
Thoreau was influenced by Indian spiritual thought. In Walden, there are many overt references to the sacred texts of India. For example, in the first chapter ("Economy"), he writes: "How much more admirable the Bhagvat-Geeta than all the ruins of the East!" American Philosophy: An Encyclopedia classes him as one of several figures who "took a more pantheist or pandeist approach by rejecting views of God as separate from the world", also a characteristic of Hinduism.

Furthermore, in "The Pond in Winter", he equates Walden Pond with the sacred Ganges river, writing: "In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Brahmin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges."

Thoreau was aware his Ganges imagery could have been factual. He wrote about ice harvesting at Walden Pond. And he knew that New England's ice merchants were shipping ice to foreign ports, including Calcutta.

Additionally, Thoreau followed various Hindu customs, including a diet largely consisting of rice ("It was fit that I should live on rice, mainly, who loved so well the philosophy of India." ), flute playing (reminiscent of the favorite musical pastime of Krishna), and yoga.

In an 1849 letter to his friend H.G.O. Blake, he wrote about yoga and its meaning to him:

"Free in this world as the birds in the air, disengaged from every kind of chains, those who practice yoga gather in Brahma the certain fruits of their works. Depend upon it that, rude and careless as I am, I would fain practice the yoga faithfully. The yogi, absorbed in contemplation, contributes in his degree to creation; he breathes a divine perfume, he hears wonderful things. Divine forms traverse him without tearing him, and united to the nature which is proper to him, he goes, he acts as animating original matter. To some extent, and at rare intervals, even I am a yogi."

Biology
Thoreau read contemporary works in the new science of biology, including the works of Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Darwin, and Asa Gray (Charles Darwin's staunchest American ally). Thoreau was deeply influenced by Humboldt, especially his work Cosmos.

In 1859, Thoreau purchased and read Darwin's On the Origin of Species. Unlike many natural historians at the time, including Louis Agassiz who publicly opposed Darwinism in favor of a static view of nature, Thoreau was immediately enthusiastic about the theory of evolution by natural selection and endorsed it, stating:

"The development theory implies a greater vital force in Nature, because it is more flexible and accommodating, and equivalent to a sort of constant new creation. (A quote from On the Origin of Species follows this sentence.)"

Influence

"Thoreau's careful observations and devastating conclusions have rippled into time, becoming stronger as the weaknesses Thoreau noted have become more pronounced ... Events that seem to be completely unrelated to his stay at Walden Pond have been influenced by it, including the national park system, the British labor movement, the creation of India, the civil rights movement, the hippie revolution, the environmental movement, and the wilderness movement. Today, Thoreau's words are quoted with feeling by liberals, socialists, anarchists, libertarians, and conservatives alike."

Thoreau's political writings had little impact during his lifetime, as "his contemporaries did not see him as a theorist or as a radical", viewing him instead as a naturalist. They either dismissed or ignored his political essays, including Civil Disobedience. The only two complete books (as opposed to essays) published in his lifetime, Walden and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), both dealt with nature, in which he "loved to wander". His obituary was lumped in with others rather than as a separate article in an 1862 yearbook. Critics and the public continued either to disdain or to ignore Thoreau for years, but the publication of extracts from his journal in the 1880s by his friend H.G.O. Blake, and of a definitive set of Thoreau's works by the Riverside Press between 1893 and 1906, led to the rise of what literary historian F. L. Pattee called a "Thoreau cult".

Thoreau's writings went on to influence many public figures. Political leaders and reformers like Mohandas Gandhi, U.S. President John F. Kennedy, American civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr., U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, and Russian author Leo Tolstoy all spoke of being strongly affected by Thoreau's work, particularly Civil Disobedience, as did "right-wing theorist Frank Chodorov [who] devoted an entire issue of his monthly, Analysis, to an appreciation of Thoreau".

Thoreau also influenced many artists and authors including Edward Abbey, Willa Cather, Marcel Proust, William Butler Yeats, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Upton Sinclair, E. B. White, Lewis Mumford, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alexander Posey, and Gustav Stickley. Thoreau also influenced naturalists like John Burroughs, John Muir, E. O. Wilson, Edwin Way Teale, Joseph Wood Krutch, B. F. Skinner, David Brower, and Loren Eiseley, whom Publishers Weekly called "the modern Thoreau".

Thoreau's friend William Ellery Channing published his first biography, Thoreau the Poet-Naturalist, in 1873. English writer Henry Stephens Salt wrote a biography of Thoreau in 1890, which popularized Thoreau's ideas in Britain: George Bernard Shaw, Edward Carpenter, and Robert Blatchford were among those who became Thoreau enthusiasts as a result of Salt's advocacy. Mohandas Gandhi first read Walden in 1906 while working as a civil rights activist in Johannesburg, South Africa. He first read Civil Disobedience "while he sat in a South African prison for the crime of nonviolently protesting discrimination against the Indian population in the Transvaal. The essay galvanized Gandhi, who wrote and published a synopsis of Thoreau's argument, calling its 'incisive logic ... unanswerable' and referring to Thoreau as 'one of the greatest and most moral men America has produced'." He told American reporter Webb Miller, "[Thoreau's] ideas influenced me greatly. I adopted some of them and recommended the study of Thoreau to all of my friends who were helping me in the cause of Indian Independence. Why I actually took the name of my movement from Thoreau's essay 'On the Duty of Civil Disobedience', written about 80 years ago."

Martin Luther King Jr. noted in his autobiography that his first encounter with the idea of nonviolent resistance was reading "On Civil Disobedience" in 1944 while attending Morehouse College. He wrote in his autobiography that it was,

"Here, in this courageous New Englander's refusal to pay his taxes and his choice of jail rather than support a war that would spread slavery's territory into Mexico, I made my first contact with the theory of nonviolent resistance. Fascinated by the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil system, I was so deeply moved that I reread the work several times. I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. No other person has been more eloquent and passionate in getting this idea across than Henry David Thoreau. As a result of his writings and personal witness, we are the heirs of a legacy of creative protest. The teachings of Thoreau came alive in our civil rights movement; indeed, they are more alive than ever before. Whether expressed in a sit-in at lunch counters; a freedom ride into Mississippi; a peaceful protest in Albany, Georgia; a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama; these are outgrowths of Thoreau's insistence that evil must be resisted and that no moral man can patiently adjust to injustice."

American psychologist B. F. Skinner wrote that he carried a copy of Thoreau's Walden with him in his youth. In 1945 he wrote Walden Two, a fictional utopia about 1,000 members of a community living together inspired by the life of Thoreau. Thoreau and his fellow Transcendentalists from Concord were a major inspiration of the composer Charles Ives. The 4th movement of the Concord Sonata for piano (with a part for flute, Thoreau's instrument) is a character picture, and he also set Thoreau's words.

Actor Ron Thompson did a dramatic portrayal of Henry David Thoreau in the 1976 NBC television series The Rebels.

Thoreau's ideas have impacted and resonated with various strains in the anarchist movement, with Emma Goldman referring to him as "the greatest American anarchist". Green anarchism and anarcho-primitivism in particular have both derived inspiration and ecological points-of-view from the writings of Thoreau. John Zerzan included Thoreau's text "Excursions" (1863) in his edited compilation of works in the anarcho-primitivist tradition titled Against civilization: Readings and reflections. Additionally, Murray Rothbard, the founder of anarcho-capitalism, has opined that Thoreau was one of the "great intellectual heroes" of his movement. Thoreau was also an important influence on late 19th-century anarchist naturism. Globally, Thoreau's concepts also held importance within individualist anarchist circles in Spain,   France, and Portugal.

For the 200th anniversary of his birth, publishers released several new editions of his work: a recreation of Walden 1902 edition with illustrations, a picture book with excerpts from Walden, and an annotated collection of Thoreau's essays on slavery. The United States Postal Service issued a commemorative stamp honoring Thoreau on May 23, 2017, in Concord, MA.

Criticism
Thoreau's work and career received little attention until 1865, when the North American Review published James Russell Lowell's review of various papers of Thoreau's that Emerson had collected and edited. Lowell's essay, Letters to Various Persons, which Lowell republished as a chapter in his My Study Windows, derided Thoreau as a humorless poseur trafficking in commonplaces, a sentimentalist lacking in imagination, a "Diogenes in his barrel", resentfully criticizing what he could not attain. Lowell's caustic analysis influenced Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson, who criticized Thoreau as a "skulker", saying "He did not wish virtue to go out of him among his fellow-men, but slunk into a corner to hoard it for himself."

Nathaniel Hawthorne had mixed feelings about Thoreau. He noted that "He is a keen and delicate observer of nature—a genuine observer—which, I suspect, is almost as rare a character as even an original poet; and Nature, in return for his love, seems to adopt him as her especial child, and shows him secrets which few others are allowed to witness." On the other hand, he also wrote that Thoreau "repudiated all regular modes of getting a living, and seems inclined to lead a sort of Indian life among civilized men".

In a similar vein, poet John Greenleaf Whittier detested what he deemed to be the "wicked" and "heathenish" message of Walden, claiming that Thoreau wanted man to "lower himself to the level of a woodchuck and walk on four legs".

In response to such criticisms, English novelist George Eliot, writing for the Westminster Review, characterized such critics as uninspired and narrow-minded: "People—very wise in their own eyes—who would have every man's life ordered according to a particular pattern, and who are intolerant of every existence the utility of which is not palpable to them, may pooh-pooh Mr. Thoreau and this episode in his history, as unpractical and dreamy."

Thoreau himself also responded to the criticism in a paragraph of his work Walden by illustrating the irrelevance of their inquiries:

"I should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice of my readers if very particular inquiries had not been made by my townsmen concerning my mode of life, which some would call impertinent, though they do not appear to me at all impertinent, but, considering the circumstances, very natural and pertinent. Some have asked what I got to eat; if I did not feel lonesome; if I was not afraid; and the like. Others have been curious to learn what portion of my income I devoted to charitable purposes; and some, who have large families, how many poor children I maintained. ... Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives; ... I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits."

Recent criticism has accused Thoreau of hypocrisy, misanthropy, and being sanctimonious, based on his writings in Walden, although this criticism has been perceived as highly selective.

Selected works
Many of Thoreau's works were not published during his lifetime, including his journals and numerous unfinished manuscripts.
 * Aulus Persius Flaccus (1840)
 * The Service (1840)
 * A Walk to Wachusett (1842)
 * Paradise (to be) Regained (1843)
 * The Landlord (1843)
 * Sir Walter Raleigh (1844)
 * Herald of Freedom (1844)
 * Wendell Phillips Before the Concord Lyceum (1845)
 * Reform and the Reformers (1846–48)
 * Thomas Carlyle and His Works (1847)
 * A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849)
 * Resistance to Civil Government, or Civil Disobedience, or On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (1849)
 * An Excursion to Canada (1853)
 * Slavery in Massachusetts (1854)
 * Walden (1854)
 * A Plea for Captain John Brown (1859)
 * Remarks After the Hanging of John Brown (1859)
 * The Last Days of John Brown (1860)
 * Walking (1862)
 * Autumnal Tints (1862)
 * Wild Apples: The History of the Apple Tree (1862)
 * The Fall of the Leaf (1863)
 * Excursions (1863)
 * Life Without Principle (1863)
 * Night and Moonlight (1863)
 * The Highland Light (1864)
 * The Maine Woods (1864) Fully Annotated Edition. Jeffrey S. Cramer, ed., Yale University Press, 2009
 * Cape Cod (1865)
 * Letters to Various Persons (1865)
 * A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers (1866)
 * Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881)
 * Summer (1884)
 * Winter (1888)
 * Autumn (1892)
 * Miscellanies (1894)
 * Familiar Letters of Henry David Thoreau (1894)
 * Poems of Nature (1895)
 * Some Unpublished Letters of Henry D. and Sophia E. Thoreau (1898)
 * The First and Last Journeys of Thoreau (1905)
 * Journal of Henry David Thoreau (1906)
 * The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau edited by Walter Harding and Carl Bode (Washington Square: New York University Press, 1958)
 * I Was Made Erect and Lone
 * The Bluebird Carries the Sky on His Back (Stanyan, 1970)
 * The Dispersion of Seeds published as Faith in a Seed (Island Press, 1993)
 * The Indian Notebooks (1847–1861) selections by Richard F. Fleck
 * Wild Fruits (Unfinished at his death, W.W. Norton, 1999)

Texts

 * Works by Thoreau at Open Library
 * Poems by Thoreau at the Academy of American Poets
 * The Thoreau Reader by The Thoreau Society
 * The Writings of Henry David Thoreau at The Walden Woods Project
 * Scans of Thoreau's Land Surveys at the Concord Free Public Library
 * Henry David Thoreau Online– The Works and Life of Henry D. Thoreau
 * Poems by Thoreau at the Academy of American Poets
 * The Thoreau Reader by The Thoreau Society
 * The Writings of Henry David Thoreau at The Walden Woods Project
 * Scans of Thoreau's Land Surveys at the Concord Free Public Library
 * Henry David Thoreau Online– The Works and Life of Henry D. Thoreau

title: Henry David Thoreau