Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) is best known as the author of Walden and the essay Civil Disobedience.  He was born into a freethinking but poor family in Concord, Massachusetts engaged in the pencil-making business.  He attended Concord Academy and Harvard College, graduating in 1837, returning to Concord to work in the family business and found a progressive school, among other endeavors. He became friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson, already a prominent philosopher, essayist and poet who had settled in Concord.  Emerson was the figurehead of the Transcendentalist movement, which emphasized the individual soul, personal truth and self-reliance, and correspondingly discounted the value of social norms and traditions.  Thoreau’s irreverent views were encouraged by the followers and he found modest success publishing nature writings and book reviews in the Trancendentalist journal The Dial.  In 1845 he built a cabin on Walden Pond and set out on a “personal experiment” to contemplate nature and human nature in relative isolation for two years, famously documented in Walden. He lived off and on as a pensioner at the Emerson’s residence, but returned to the family home and business in the 1850’s after the friendship with Emerson cooled.  He took on an active role in abolitionist movement in the 1850’s before contracting tuberculosis, which felled him at age forty-four.