Victor Nuovo: Thoreau, a true American freethinker

Editor’s note: After a short pause, this series picks up today with the 26th essay.Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) was a poet, a naturalist, and a philosopher endowed with an acute moral sensibility. He was familiar with the Socratic dictum, “The unexamined life is not worth living” and applied it to himself. His journal, consisting of 2 million words, is a searching record of his daily life; indeed, everything that he wrote is self-revealing. If you read his writings, you will not fail to meet the author.The … (read more)

Editor’s note: This is the 36th in a series of essays on the history and meaning of the American political tradition. Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” rightly belongs among the founding documents of this nation. It complements the “Declaration o … (read more)