The Skimmer

The Thoreau You Don’t Know By Robert Sullivan Collins; 354 pages

By the time we finish high school, most of us know Henry David Thoreau as “the eccentric who went into the wild to live monastically,” as Robert Sullivan puts it–an image that Sullivan, author of the rodent history Rats, says is entirely wrong. The man who penned Walden and Civil Disobedience was eminently sociable, quite funny and more interested in social critique than in actually persuading people to shun society and live in a shack in the woods. Walden was “written to inspire modern citizens to break out from the lockstep of culture and in so doing make a new connection to their community”–Thoreau as uniter, not divider. And despite Sullivan’s insistence that he has not written a biography of the man, there’s nothing that his book resembles more than a minilife, full of historical context (a section on mid–19th century economics), personal anecdotes (Thoreau and his brother were at one point in love with the same woman) and analyses of his work. While never fully convincing in his reappraisal, Sullivan makes an elegant case.

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