Henry David Thoreau Archives ~ The Imaginative Conservative

Thoreau’s Guilty Conscience

By Michael J. Connolly|2023-07-12T00:21:51-05:00July 11th, 2023|Categories: Henry David Thoreau, Justice, Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Politics, Timeless Essays|

There could be no Henry David Thoreau without a Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson glorified the individual independence of the new American; Thoreau evolved that into a nation-less, anarchic, natural man of subjective conscience. In 1838, Harvard College exiled a young James Russell Lowell to the tutelage of a minister in Concord, Massachusetts, a suspension for [...]

The Quieter Life

To know what I was like as a teenager in the eighties, you should know this: at a time when most boys’ heroes were sports figures, mine was an antisocial weirdo who had been dead for 125 years. I first encountered Henry David Thoreau when Mrs. Meyer, my eighth-grade English teacher, assigned us his essay [...]