Henry David Thoreau and the Necessity of Conviction

For generations, Henry David Thoreau has been a model of how to live according to one's deepest convictions. His writing inspired Gandhi's doctrine of passive resistance, and his experiment in living a simple existence at Walden remains a touchstone for the environmental movement. Thoreau was an immensely complex man, however, and now we have a modern biography adequate to his thought and his art, Laura Dassow Walls' Henry David Thoreau: A Life. Perhaps the leading scholar today on Thoreau, Walls puts her subject at the intersections of science and philosophy in nineteenth-century America.

This program is presented in partnership with the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture at the University of Chicago and The Newberry Library.