Henry David Thoreau went to Walden Pond to “to front only the essential facts of life.” But as the scholar Laura Dassow Walls shows in her biography of Thoreau, there was much more to his life and work than his brief experiment at living in the woods. (Rebroadcast)
Henry David Thoreau famously went to Walden Pond to “live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.” But as the scholar Laura Dassow Walls shows in her biography, there was much more to Thoreau’s life and work than his brief experiment at Spartan living in the woods. He was an inventor, a manual laborer, a gifted naturalist, a writer of great originality, and an uncompromising abolitionist. Walls joins us to explore Thoreau’s profound, complex, and influential life. (Rebroadcast)
Laura Dassow Walls is the William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English at Notre Dame University’s Graduate Program in History and Philosophy of Science. Her new book is called Henry David Thoreau: A Life [Independent booksellers|Amazon].