"Read the best books first, or you may not
have a chance to read them at all.". - Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau's words are even more relevant today than they were
in his time. According to
So Many Books, the cumulative bibliography of the
world was about 3.3 million titles in 1850 - around the time
Thoreau wrote this; today it is
closer to 60 million!
Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts
in 1817. He began his lifelong habit of journal keeping
while at Harvard. After graduating in 1837 he taught briefly
but resigned to protest the use of corporal punishment on
the students, specifically whippings.
Shortly afterwards, he and his brother, John
Thoreau, opened a private school in Concord based on
Transcendentalism (the popular literary and philosophical
movement that asserted the primacy of the spiritual and
transcendental over the material and empirical, and
apparently grew from a desire to create an uniquely American
body of literature and philosophy to mirror the independence
that America had enjoyed politically since 1776).
The school was closed when John fell ill
(and later died) and Thoreau moved in with Ralph Waldo
Emerson (one of the founders of Transcendentalism), where he
continued writing his journals.
Although some of his work was published
during his lifetime, such as Walden, Or Life In the Woods
(1854), he was little known outside his immediate circle and
most of his writing was not published until after his death
in 1862; he did not come to be regarded as
a major literary figure until the 20th century.
This quote & biography originally ran in an issue of BookBrowse's membership magazine. Full Membership Features & Benefits.
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Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
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