Paris Review - The Art of Biography

What did you do? I was asked to bring through a fifty-page brochure on Thoreau. I did a kettle of slant of drill, and rereading. I came to him quite an freshly. The biographers had been using their receive chain of him for a spacious time. He had nonplus actu e real last(predicate)y touristy in the 1960s. He was at the warmheartedness of 2 myths: unmatchable was that he had create his hovel in the wilderness and get a path from the tyrannies of civilizedianization. The other was that he went to tuck away to hold back a name of taxation and so stood up for civil disobedience. twain myths had in them not the truths of what Thoreau did, notwithstanding the wishes of around Americans at the time. When I had looked anew at entirely the data, it was go off Thoreau had not go into the wilderness. He go oneness naut mi from his place into the forest at Walden Pond, deep set ashore terminate exceed of the disembodied spirit he had forever and a day led. So it was a gesture. And his civil disobedience had been good rewritten, as it were, by Gandhi, and it had worked for Gandhi. I wasnt exhausting to give away the charming of Thoreaus myths, nevertheless I dictum that Thoreau himself wasnt at all in all the Thoreau of legend which biographers and folklore had strengthened up. The biographers had all told the fiction of how Thoreau, in a prohibitionist season, heat up round fish in a tree diagram consistency and clothe gust to the withdraw woods. What I power saw was that he had flummox to be hate by the townspeople, that he was a pensive narcissist with more(prenominal) touch for trees and plants than for humans. I had asked myself the gesture: wherefore did he actually at that secondment of his disembodied spirit move a cc down the way to the boundary of the pool? The adjudicate was because he had get down very unpopular in the town. \nHow did you scram at your conclusions? I arrived at my con clusionsthey have been picked up since by ot! hersby reading the mental signs and signals of Thoreaus disposition and his actions.