Arts & Letters Daily search results for “thoreau” (30)
2012-08-18 | Naturalist, philosopher, oddball - Thoreau wrote prodigiously but remains inscrutable. "I love Henry," Emerson said, "but I cannot like him" more »
2014-01-25 | For Thoreau, the quarry was Walden Pond; for Faulkner, Yoknapatawpha County; for Benjamin, Berlin. Oh, The pleasures of literary cartography more »
2016-06-22 | A strange blend of Thoreau, Edison, and Ford, Buckminster Fuller was a consummate visionary. He was also a failure and a fraud more »
2018-07-20 | Balzac and Paris. Faulkner and Mississippi. Thoreau and Walden Pond. Solzhenitsyn and ... Vermont? How the Russian novelist made rural New England his home more »
2020-04-22 | Thoreau showed how the telegraph could alter our sense of time and space. Howard Axelrod shows us what that alteration now looks like more »
2016-03-05 | What happened to Annie Dillard? She seemed like a Thoreau for our time, a major voice in letters. Then came hypocrisy, spiritual snobbery, and silence more »
2021-07-21 | Thoreau-bashing is in vogue, but it is misdirected. The real problem isn’t his quietism, but his obsession with self-emancipation more »
2015-10-14 | Terrible Thoreau! Sanctimonious, egotistical, elitist, parochial, above all a hypocrite — why do we continue to respect his writing? more »
2011-01-01 | Thoreau, Keats, Blake, and Shelley grasped the value of idleness, but is there any condition more out of sync with the goal-driven ethos of our age? more »
2016-02-13 | Thoreau and mortality. His brother’s death drove him to science — even ornithology — in an ontological quest more »
2021-09-25 | Thoreau never wanted followers; he didn't even follow his own advice. So what would he make of all these acolytes? more »
2014-07-25 | He mingled with Emerson and Thoreau, enjoyed wine and cigars with Trollope, Wilde, and Twain. Julian Hawthorne was the Zelig of his time more »
2010-01-01 | The august tutelage of Emerson, Thoreau, and her father made Louisa May Alcott acutely conscious of unseen, spiritual realities. Still, she could play them for laughs more »
2012-08-20 | If solitude doesn't lead us back to companionship, then where does it lead? Emerson and Thoreau knew well "the dangers of forest thinking" more »
2016-12-03 | Thoreau comes down to us as an earnest man committed to worthy causes. We do him a disservice when we fail to get his jokes more »
2019-08-16 | “Natural and unconstrained.” Nudism in America was shaped by Whitman, Thoreau, German philosophy, and the American Sunbathing Association more »
2021-10-13 | He was a shy college graduate; she was a neurotic 38-year-old mother of two. What was there between Henry Thoreau and Lidian Emerson? more »
2021-11-23 | The individualism of Emerson and Thoreau was not a precursor of libertarianism. But their outlooks bear remarkable resemblances more »
2017-04-06 | Darwin’s work set off an intellectual earthquake in America. It transformed Thoreau from a poet into a geologist, altered abolitionism, and spurred a generation of literary naturalists more »
2017-06-09 | In the end, it's been said, authors write for professors. But the scholarly fate of Thoreau is uncertain; the 7,000 pages of his journal still await full study. It is the great untold secret of American letters more »
2022-01-08 | “As inventive and inspiring as Emerson and Thoreau often were, their zeal for ‘individual freedom’ has curdled into a socially destructive force” more »
2016-07-15 | American utopianism was not as popular with intellectuals as it might have been. As Thoreau put it, "I'd rather keep bachelor's hall in hell than go to board in heaven" more »
2013-03-05 | Here's where Thoreau drew the line: city life on one side, nature on the other. You can't have it both ways. But does modern life really permit a choice? more »
2017-07-06 | Thoreau’s philosophy was based on rivers as well as on Walden. What, then, to make of his siding with industrialists over local farmers when it came to water levels? more »
2017-07-17 | Mocking Thoreau is a pastime that dates back to his time. He was tagged as a hypocrite, a fraud — and a lazy one at that — even before Walden was published more »
2017-08-19 | Thoreau was a critic of triviality, gossip, and distraction. He preferred communing with dead authors to chatting with his neighbors. What would he have made of Twitter? more »
2017-06-01 | Why we need Thoreau. His critics note that his moral vision was linked to self-righteousness. But who hasn’t felt self-righteous? His frustrations are ours as well more »
2018-02-12 | In search of a sacred combe, a place of retreat and artistic genesis. It's not a real place, except when it is. Thoreau found Walden Pond; Yeats found the Isle of Innisfree more »
2019-06-25 | Thoreau was a fault-finder; Emerson, a showoff. They wanted to be friends, but, as Emerson put it, “Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables” more »
2017-10-11 | “What are these pines & these birds about?” wondered Thoreau. “I must know a little more.” So he embarked on his masterpiece — not Walden, but his journal more »