The Days of Henry Thoreau: A Biography
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.44 (801 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0486242633 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 528 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2016-07-26 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Walter Harding is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of American Literature at the State University of New York at Geneseo.
"The best biography we have had."--Carl Bode, The New York Times Book Review
Johnny Zhivago said A Wonderful Life. If you like the writings of Thoreau, you will love this biography. Thoreau really comes to life and Walter Harding does a great job at aquainting us with Thoreau as if he were our neighbor or close friend. You will love all the stories of his childhood, his many excursions and his never ending desire for knowledge of nature. Also, at the end Harding dicusses Thoreaus's sexuality, which for me was a . A perfect combination of scholarship and story -- the life of an exceptional individual Nate Walter Harding's biography of Henry David Thoreau is easily the most readable and thorough of the many accounts of his life. It represents an ideal blend of description and narrative with solid scholarship. Harding clearly explains what is known and how it is known, drawing from an extremely broad familiarity with the literature and with the many sources of information about Thoreau's life. He does . Kirk McElhearn said Probably the finest biography of Thoreau. This is probably the best biography of Henry David Thoreau, the most individual of American essayists. Walter Harding is one of those academics who not only knows his subject backwards and forward, but treats him with reverence. Yet this is not a mere hagiography. Thoreau's life is put into the context of the mid-19th century, and the reader develops a much greater understanding of why Thoreau wrote
On its appearance, Professor Harding's work immediately established itself as "the standard biography" (Edward Wagenknecht). Scholars will find here the culmination of a lifetime of research and study, meticulously documented; general readers will find an absorbing story of a remarkable man. You will find the social as well as the reclusive Thoreau. Writing always with supreme clarity, Professor Harding has marshaled all the facts so as best to "let them speak for themselves." Thoreau's thoughtfulness and stubbornness, his more than ordinarily human amalgam of the earthy and the sublime, his unquenchable vitality emerge to the reader as they did to his own family, friends, and critics.You will see Thoreau's work in his family's pencil factory, his accidental setting of a forest fire, his love of children and hatred of hypocrisy, his contributions to the scientific understanding of forest trees, and other more and less familiar aspects of the man and his works. Reactions to him by such notable contemporaries as Margaret Ful