Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau went to Harvard, taught briefly, and made his living for most of his life as a surveyor and in his family's pencil factory, where he worked out how to grind graphite finely enough to make the best pencils in America. He is one of the few major writers who was also a competent industrial chemist.

In 1845 he built a one-room cabin at Walden Pond and lived there two years and two months. The persistent picture of a hermit in the wilderness is wrong and he never claimed it: the pond was under two miles from Concord, his mother's house was walkable, and visitors came constantly. The experiment was about deliberate living and the cost of things, not about solitude.

In 1846 he spent a night in jail for refusing a poll tax that funded slavery and the war with Mexico. An aunt paid it, over his objection, and let him out. The essay that came from it was barely noticed in his lifetime and later reached Gandhi and King.

He was a committed abolitionist who defended John Brown in public when almost nobody would. He died of tuberculosis in 1862, at forty-four, leaving a journal of some two million words.