A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

When Ralph Waldo Emerson moved to Concord in 1835, Thoreau formed a close relationship with him and with others associated with the Transcendentalist group. He worked in his father’s pencil business while keeping the journals that would become his life’s work.

Thoreau took over the Concord Academy for several years, where he taught foreign languages and science, before closing the school in 1841. By now he was regularly publishing poems and essays. For a time he worked in Emerson’s household as a handyman, and in 1845 he built a cabin on some property of Emerson’s at Walden Pond, staying for a little over two years.

He spent a night in jail in 1846 as a protest against slavery, and later explained his motives in the essay “Civil Disobedience” (1849). His first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), was based on a boat trip he took some years earlier with his brother. The book made little impact and sold only a few hundred copies.

Thoreau became increasingly involved in the Abolitionist movement and began to work for the Underground Railroad.

Walden, on which he had been working ever since his residence at the pond, was published in 1854 and proved unexpectedly successful.

Thoreau met John Brown in 1857, and following Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry delivered “A Plea for Captain John Brown” in his defense.

For many years Thoreau had been at work on a projected study of American Indians, compiling thousands of pages of notes and extracts, and in 1861 he traveled to Minnesota. By this time, however, he had contracted tuberculosis and it became clear that he would not live long; he died on May 6, 1862. His later travel writings, The Maine Woods (1864) and Cape Cod (1865), were published posthumously.