Despite his short life, the nineteenth century American author Henry David Thoreau has become an enduring symbol of not one, but two popular tropes. Through his much-loved book Walden, an account of his two years living in a hut he built by the side of Walden Pond in Massachusetts, Thoreau has become an emblem of a certain kind of rugged self-reliance. He’s a perennial hero to those wanting to stand apart from society and return to a simpler, less crowded and complicated life. Equally, by going to jail for refusing to pay a tax that would fund an unjust war, for reasons laid out with aphoristic flair in his essay ‘Civil Disobedience’, Thoreau has become a figure of moral courage, a staunch and principled resister of unjust state power and oppression.
