关于瓦尔登湖中大卫梭罗的自然观分析.docVIP

I. Introduction A. About the author Henry David Thoreau Henry David Thoreau was born in 1817. His father, John, was a pencil maker. Thoreau studied at Harvard University between 1833 and1837. In 1837, he worked as a pencil maker with his father, a handyman, a farmer, yet was at the same time an accomplished Greek scholar. Henry David Thoreau was a complex man of many talents who worked hard to shape his craft and his life, seeing little difference between them. One of his first memories was of staying awake at night “looking through the stars to see if I could see God behind them.” One might say he never stopped looking into nature for ultimate Truth. Henry grew up very close to his older brother John, who taught school to help pay for Henry’s tuition at Harvard. While there, Henry read a small book by his Concord neighbor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, and in a sense he never finished exploring its ideas— although always definitely on his own terms, just as he explored everything! He?and his brother taught school for a while but in 1842, John cut himself while shaving and died of lockjaw in his brother’s arms, an untimely death which traumatized the 25-year-old Henry. He?worked for several years as a surveyor making pencils with his father, but at the age of 28 in 1845, wanting to write his first book, he went to Walden Pond and built his cabin on land owned by Emerson. While at Walden, Thoreau did an incredible amount of reading and writing, yet he also spent much time sauntering in nature. He gave a lecture and was imprisoned briefly for not paying his poll tax, but mostly he wrote a book as a memorial to a river trip he had taken with his brother, A?Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. After two years, Thoreau returned to Concord—a bare two miles away which he had visited frequently during his stay at the pond, having completed his experiment in living and his book. Unfortunately, few people were interested in purchasing his book, so he spent the next nine y