This month marks the bicentenary of the birth of the American author and naturalist Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862). Despite the century and a half that have passed since his premature death – he was 44 when he succumbed to tuberculosis – Thoreau remains arguably the most important writer in the English language on our relationship with the rest of nature.
His book Walden (1854), widely viewed as his masterpiece, is available today in at least 17 different editions, and such is its enduring status as one of the classics of American literature that the novelist John Updike feared it was at risk of the same literary condition as the Bible: exalted but unread. Despite such misgivings, Thoreau’s continued relevance is indisputable. Almost every word that he ever wrote – much of it unpublished in his lifetime – is still in print in some form or other, including A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), The Maine Woods (1864), Cape Cod (1865), his collected essays and poems and his monumental, two-million-word journal, which runs to 14 volumes.
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