* Reflections on a Child's Water Wheel — an Excerpt from Thoreau's 1848 Journal

Henry David Thoreau's classic essay Civil Disobedience ( Thoreau ) | Civil Disobedience inspired Martin Luther King and many other activists.

Thoreau's 1849 essay " Resistance to Civil Government " was eventually renamed " Essay on Civil Disobedience.

The tax collector who arrested him rose to higher political office, and Thoreau's essay was not published until after the end of the Mexican War.

Thoreau's first essay published there was Aulus Persius Flaccus, an essay on the playwright of the same name, published in The Dial in July 1840.

He also kept a series of notebooks, and these observations became the source for Thoreau's late natural history writings, such as Autumnal Tints, The Succession of Trees, and Wild Apples, an essay lamenting the destruction of indigenous and wild apple species.

The essay galvanized Gandhi, who wrote and published a synopsis of Thoreau's argument, calling its ' incisive logic.

Why I actually took the name of my movement from Thoreau's essay ' On the Duty of Civil Disobedience ,' written about 80 years ago.

Thoreau's essay espoused John Brown and his fight for abolition.

* Walden. org: Thoreau's essay

Prior to the 2002 SGA election, the phrase " Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine " from Henry David Thoreau's essay " Civil Disobedience " was chalked on the outer wall of the Amelia Gayle Gorgas Library.

In 1866, four years after Thoreau's death, the essay was reprinted in a collection of Thoreau's work ( A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers ) under the title Civil Disobedience.

In 1907, about one year into his first satyagraha campaign in South Africa, he wrote a translated synopsis of Thoreau's argument for Indian Opinion, credited Thoreau's essay with being " the chief cause of the abolition of slavery in America ", and wrote that " Both his example and writings are at present exactly applicable to the Indians in the Transvaal.

Thus, by the time Thoreau's lectures were first published under the title " Civil Disobedience ," in 1866, four years after his death, the term had achieved fairly widespread usage.

" Richard Drinnon partly blames Thoreau for the ambiguity, noting that Thoreau's " sly satire, his liking for wide margins for his writing, and his fondness for paradox provided ammunition for widely divergent interpretations of ' Civil Disobedience.

Thoreau's speech proved persuasive: first the abolitionist movement began to accept Brown as a martyr, and by the time of the American Civil War entire armies of the North were literally singing Brown's praises.

Political leaders and reformers like Mahatma Gandhi, President John F. Kennedy, civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr., Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, and Russian author Leo Tolstoy all spoke of being strongly affected by Thoreau's work, particularly Civil Disobedience, as did " right-wing theorist Frank Chodorov devoted an entire issue of his monthly, Analysis, to an appreciation of Thoreau.

" The Influence of Thoreau's ' Civil Disobedience ' on Gandhi's Satyagraha.

The majority opinion was that the law was overinclusive, and would have prevented the publication of such works as The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Thoreau's Civil Disobedience, and even The Confessions of Saint Augustine.

* The Theory, Practice, and Influence of Thoreau's Civil Disobedience by Lawrence Rosenwald

* The Theory, Practice & Influence of Thoreau's Civil Disobedience by Lawrence Rosenwald

John Zerzan included Thoreau's text " Excursions " ( 1863 ) in his edited compilation of works in the anarcho-primitivist tradition titled Against civilization: Readings and reflections.

Resistance also served as part of Thoreau's metaphor comparing the government to a machine: when the machine was producing injustice, it was the duty of conscientious citizens to be " a counter friction " ( i. e., a resistance ) " to stop the machine.

Aware he was dying, Thoreau's last words were " Now comes good sailing ", followed by two lone words, " moose " and " Indian ".

Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson judged Thoreau's endorsement of living alone and apart from modern society in natural simplicity to be a mark of " unmanly " effeminacy and " womanish solitude ", while deeming him a self-indulgent " skulker.

Desert Solitaire is regarded as one of the finest nature narratives in American literature, and has been compared to Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac and Thoreau's Walden.

Thoreau's political writings had little impact during his lifetime, as " his contemporaries did not see him as a theorist or as a radical, viewing him instead as a naturalist.

His thought is an early influence on green anarchism but with an emphasis on the individual experience of the natural world influencing later naturist currents, simple living as a rejection of a materialist lifestyle and self-sufficiency were Thoreau's goals, and the whole project was inspired by transcendentalist philosophy.

" Nevertheless, Thoreau's writings went on to influence many public figures.

It eventually became an essential influence for Thoreau's later writings, including his seminal Walden.

Thoreau's birthplace still exists on Virginia Road in Concord and is currently the focus of preservation efforts.

" Scintilla ( poem on Thoreau's last words )

Reconstruction of Henry David Thoreau's cabin on the shores of Walden Pond

Historian Catherine Albanese stated that in one of his letters, " Muir's eucharist made Thoreau's feast on wood-chuck and huckleberry seem almost anemic.

He said: " Thoreau's Walden is a capital reading, but very wicked and heathenish ... After all, for me, I prefer walking on two legs ".

In this work, a net of cast aluminum letters forming a passage from Henry David Thoreau's Walden stretches across the museum's atrium and pours down into an illegible pile of letters on the floor below.

It is also the title of Henry David Thoreau's A Walk to Wachusett, which describes the transcendentalist author's experiences on the summit.

In the U. S. A., Henry David Thoreau's works and Susan Fenimore Cooper's Rural Hours ( 1850 ) were canonical influences on Victorian nature writing.

This repository includes the collections of Walter Harding and Raymond Adams, two of the foremost authorities on Thoreau and founders of the Thoreau Society ; and those of Roland Robbins, who uncovered Thoreau's Walden house site.

Thoreau's observations on living with self, society

It is the only library in the world with the first two quartos of Hamlet ; it holds the manuscript of Benjamin Franklin's autobiography, the first seven drafts of Henry David Thoreau's Walden, John James Audubon's Birds of America, a collection of manuscripts and first editions of the works of Charles Bukowski, and many other great treasures.

Burroughs was a staunch defender of Walt Whitman and Ralph Waldo Emerson, but somewhat critical of Henry David Thoreau, even while praising many of Thoreau's qualities.

Willis and his editors favorably reviewed many works now considered important today, including Henry David Thoreau's Walden and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance.