The Essays: "This world is but a canvas to our imagination."

Henry David Thoreau was born on July 12th, 1817 on Virginia Road in Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau studied at Harvard between 1833 and 1837 taking classes in rhetoric, classics, philosophy, mathematics, and science. On graduating the normal professions left him unmoved and, after a period teaching at his own school, a growing friendship with Ralph Waldo Emerson moved his career onto that of writer and observer of nature. Thoreau was a philosopher of nature and how it affected the human con...