Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau Joseph Wood Krutch 298pp.

Joseph Wood Krutch’s Henry David Thoreau is a tight, well-written biography of one of my heroes. Krutch follows Thoreau’s life in a carefully considered way, providing biographical information to fill out the author’s own autobiographical oeuvre. At times, Krutch’s writing gets a little bogged down in considering small details from Thoreau’s life and speculating on them to an unreasonable degree, but he salvages his text into an informative and eminently readable volume.

One of the difficult aspects of writing about Thoreau’s life is that his own books are such up-front biographies. Krutch doesn’t do much to overcome this, in essence this book is simply a volume explaining the little bits of Thoreau’s life not discussed in his own writing. We learn meager bits of his childhood, the vaguest hints of a love life, and most interestingly, Thoreau’s pseudo-career as a businessman after Walden pond.

A businessman?

Yes, I was shocked to learn, and this is possibly the aspect in which I am most indebted to Krutch; that after leaving Walden pond, Thoreau made his living somewhat less by working as a surveyor, but rather became increasingly entangled in the family’s pencil-manufacturing business.

Thoreau still managed to keep his own naturalist concerns in play during the later years of his life, working on filling his notebooks with observations about the world around him, but Krutch makes his finest point of analysis on the manner of Thoreau’s writing in the book’s final chapter. Walden was more or less written six years before Thoreau began working on publishing it. All of Thoreau’s great writing took a very long time to filter through his life and experience before he could talk about it and make it into the treasure it became. By the end of his life, it is not unreasonable to look at much of Thoreau’s work in his journals and loose paper and speculate on the great pieces lying dormant, ready to spring forth if only he’d had just a few more years.

Would I recommend Henry David Thoreau? To the lover of Thoreau, yes. Otherwise, no.

Score: 3.8/5

Would I keep this on my bookshelf? No.

-Mr. Cheddar