American writer, philosopher and dissident Henry David Thoreau was BOTD in 1817. Born and raised in Concord, Massachusetts, he was a gifted student, attending the Concord Academy and entering Yale University in 1833. After graduating, he returned to Concord, working briefly as a teacher before joining the family business of match-making. Inspired by his Harvard classmate and neighbour Ralph Waldo Emerson, he began writing poetry and keeping a journal. Together, they became the lead figures in Transcendentalism, a post-Romantic movement celebrating individualism and the natural world as a pathway to moral and social reform. Thoreau published his work in Emerson’s magazine The Dial, through which he met fellow radicals Amos Bronson Alcott (father of Louisa) and Margaret Fuller. After being rejected by his fiancée Ellen Sewall and the death of his brother, Thoreau moved to New York in an unsuccessful attempt to break into the literary market. He returned to Concord in 1843, where he remained for the rest of his life. He is best known for his 1854 book Walden, an account of his two years living at Emerson’s property near Walden Pond, where he built and lived in a log cabin, grew his own crops and claimed to live self-sufficiently. Arguing that “most men lead lives of quiet desperation“, Thoreau set out his theory of self-determination, alongside forensic observations of the natural world and rapturous odes to owls and frogs. A modest success on its publication, it quickly faded from public view. In 1846, Thoreau was briefly imprisoned for failing to pay taxes. The experience inspired his 1849 essay Civil Disobedience, in which he rejected the authority of the Massachusetts State legislature for its support of slavery and the Mexican war, encouraging his readers to break the law and “let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.” In later life, Walden was a prominent critic of slavery, writing and lecturing extensively in support of abolition and joining the Underground Railway to harbour fugitive slaves. He died in 1862, aged 44. Largely forgotten at his death, his posthumous reputation grew during the late 19th century, and was championed by poets Walt Whitman and Robert Frost. By the 20th century, he was recognised as a major force in American literature, while Civil Disobedience was credited with inspiring the protest movements of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. His ideas were also embraced by libertarians, who approved of his opposition to government, idealisation of self-reliance and contempt for philanthropy. A lifelong bachelor, Thoreau appears to have had no intimate relationships, and his sexuality has been the subject of extensive debate. Some critics have argued that Thoreau was a closeted gay man, citing his homoerotically-charged descriptions of a young Canadian farmer (“[I] am ready enough to fasten myself like a bloodsucker for the time to any full-blooded man that comes my way“). In recent years, his reputation has suffered due to accusations of misogyny, and various discrepancies in his claims of living self-sufficiently.