Henry David Thoreau’s maternal family, the Dunbar family, were of English descent, according to the book The Personality of Thoreau: Helier, Isle of Jersey, in 1754 and immigrated to America in 1773. John Thoreau, Sr, was the son of a French Protestant immigrant, Jean Thoreau. Henry David Thoreau had three siblings: Helen Thoreau, born 1812, John Thoreau, Jr, born 1815, and Sophia Thoreau, born 1819. Thoreau’s parents were John Thoreau and Cynthia Dunbar. Thoreau was actually born David Henry Thoreau but began calling himself Henry David after finishing college, although he never legally changed his name. Henry David Thoreau was born on Jin a farmhouse, known as the Minot house, on Virginia Road in Concord, Mass. He is most famous for his book Walden which is about his two-year experience of living in a cabin at Walden Pond in Concord. Suffering from tuberculosis, Thoreau traveled to the Great Lakes for the sake of his health, but finding no improvement and realizing that he was going to die, returned home to Concord to put his papers in order and to write his final essays, drawing as always on the Journal, the work that was the source of all his other works and the defining undertaking of his adult life.Henry David Thoreau was a writer from Concord, Massachusetts who was a part of the transcendentalist movement in the 19th century. Short trips to Maine and Cape Cod resulted in two post-humously published books ( The Maine Woods and Cape Cod), and a visit to New York led to a meeting with Walt Whitman. In the 1850s, Thoreau became increasingly active in the abolitionist cause, meeting John Brown at Emerson’s house in 1857 and, after the attack on Harpers Ferry, writing passionately in Brown’s defense. On July 4, 1845, he moved into the hut he’d constructed on Walden Pond, where he remained until September 6, 1847-a sojourn that inspired his great work Walden, published in 1854.

Thoreau also began to write for The Dial and other magazines, and in 1839 he made the boat trip that became the subject of his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). In Concord, he became acquainted with the members of the Transcendentalist Club and grew especially close to Emerson, for whom he worked as a handyman. He studied at Harvard, where he became a disciple of Emerson, and after graduating in 1837 returned to Concord to teach school with his brother. Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was born and lived the greater part of his life in Concord, Massachusetts.

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