Tentang Penulis Henry David Thoreau was born on July 12, 1817, in Concord, Massachusetts. He took over the Concord Academy for several years, where he taught foreign languages and science, before closing the school in 1841. By now he was regularly publishing poems and essays in The Dial. He spent a night in jail in 1846 as a protest against slavery, and later explained his motives in the essay ‘Civil Disobedience’ (1849). His first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), most of which had been written at Walden Pond, was based on a boat trip he took some years earlier with his brother. The book made little impact and sold only a few hundred copies. Deskripsi Produk In 1845, Thoreau moved to a cabin that he built with his own hands along the shores of Walden Pond in Massachusetts. Shedding the trivial ties that he felt bound much of humanity, Thoreau reaped from the land both physically and mentally, and pursued truth in the quiet of nature. In Walden, he explains how separating oneself from the world of men can truly awaken the sleeping self. Thoreau holds fast to the notion that you have not truly existed until you adopt such a lifestyle and only then can you reenter society, as an enlightened being. These simple but profound musings as well as “Civil Disobedience,” his protest against the government’s interference with civil liberty have inspired many to embrace his philosophy of individualism and love of nature. More than a century and a half later, his message is more timely than ever.