Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was an American naturalist, essayist, poet, and philosopher and a leading transcendentalist. He was best known for Walden, his account of living simply in the woods near Walden Pond, and for the essay "Civil Disobedience," which argues for refusing to obey an unjust state. His natural history writing anticipated later work in ecology, and he was a lifelong abolitionist who spoke out against the fugitive slave law. Thoreau's ideas on civil disobedience later shaped Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.