Henry David Thoreau

Thoreau was Concord born and Concord loyal — a Harvard graduate who came home to work in his family's pencil shop, keep school, survey woodlots, and walk four hours a day. He was Emerson's handyman, gardener, and friend, and took the older man's doctrine of self-trust more literally than anyone: if life is to be examined, examine it with your hands.

In 1845 he borrowed an axe and built a cabin on Emerson's land at Walden Pond, a mile from town, to 'front only the essential facts of life.' He stayed two years, growing beans, keeping accounts to the half-cent, reading, and writing. One night in town he was jailed for refusing the poll tax of a government that enforced slavery; the night became the essay now called Civil Disobedience, which later reached Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

Walden, the book he distilled from the experiment, took nine years and seven drafts. He died of tuberculosis at forty-four, mostly unknown, his masterpiece a commercial failure. Asked near the end whether he had made his peace with God, he answered that he was not aware they had ever quarreled.