ABSTRACT
Henry David Thoreau was a distinguished member of the Transcendentalist movement, a school of thought that was prominent in American cultural life in the 1830s and 1840s and that clearly influenced Civil Disobedience. The Transcendentalists saw both nature and the individual as inherently good and disapproved of many social developments that they thought endangered this natural purity. Ralph Waldo Emerson was the most important intellectual influence on Thoreau. He was a minister, poet, and philosopher, and is widely recognized as the father of Transcendentalism. Thoreau’s greatest contribution to the intellectual tradition is Walden, an account of the 26 months he spent in a cabin he built near Walden Pond. It is a reflection on living simply in nature, and it stresses the importance of individualism, independence, self-reliance, self-sufficiency, and discovering oneself through spirituality. Emerson took on the role of Thoreau’s mentor and instilled in him an appreciation for individualism, simplicity, self-reliance, freedom of thought, and moral obligation.
