Here is a rare thing: a slim volume on Thoreau by a preeminent scholar that is accessible yet not strictly introductory, comprehensive yet remarkably condensed. At an enticing 150 pages, Lawrence Buell's Henry David Thoreau: Thinking Disobediently is almost slender enough to serve as a bookmark in the two most significant recent monographs on Thoreau: Laura Dassow Walls’ magisterial 2017 biography, Henry David Thoreau: A Life (clocking in at 640 pages) and Branka Arsić’s illuminating 2016 study, Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau (480 pages). Buell's book charts a course between those two landmarks. Like Arsić, Buell has not written a biography but instead aims to provide something like an intellectual history of Thoreau's restless mind. Like Walls, Buell addresses himself to an audience that extends beyond the academy, offering a synoptic overview of the major contours and contradictions of Thoreau's thought that is appropriate for the educated lay reader who is familiar with Thoreau's major works.
Writing a book like this is no easy task—the archive of scholarship on Thoreau is massive—but Buell is an ideal guide. He has published extensively on Thoreau, Emerson, and Transcendentalism, and his 1995 book, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (another 600-pager), was instrumental in the formation of American ecocriticism, the field of literary studies dedicated to representations of humanity's relationship to the environment. Buell is well-known for his abiding dedication to teaching. That commitment is on display here in the intelligent plainspokenness of his prose.
Henry David Thoreau: Thinking Disobediently unfolds across seven concise chapters. The first two construct the organizing frame for Buell's study, and the next five step us through the major lenses through which Thoreau's writings have variously been understood: as exemplars of Transcendentalist philosophy; as contributions to a nascent American literary tradition; as charting a turn toward proto-ecological science; as founding a political theory of civil disobedience; and, finally, as inspirational scriptures pointing us toward nature's mystical truths. Each of these latter chapters centers on a different subset of Thoreau's writings, so that by the end of the book Buell has addressed nearly every piece of Thoreau's published and unpublished writings.
The unifying frame for this comprehensive survey of both the diversity of the works and their equally varied scholarly reception is the presiding image of Thoreau as a perhaps uniquely contradictory thinker. Buell's opening chapter, which offers a brief biographical sketch of Thoreau routed through a reading of his essay on “Walking,” explains that “the biographical Thoreau was a more than ordinarily paradoxical creature. . . . Perhaps the most basic dissonance between competing images of Thoreau stems from his being a boldly independent thinker who was also a confirmed homebody” (2–3). Buell's second chapter extends this diagnosis via a discussion of the tensions that separate the two works for which Thoreau is most widely known: Walden and “Civil Disobedience.” As Buell writes: “Some are attracted especially to the political Thoreau, reckoning his interest in the natural world either a distracting slippage or a symbolic screen for satire. For others the essential Thoreau was the father of American nature writing, the proto-modern field scientist, the patron saint of modern environmentalism, and/or voluntary simplicity” (17–18).
The book's subsequent chapters stage similar moments of incongruity or tension around which scholarly opinion has divided. Does Thoreau's work exemplify Transcendentalist philosophy or grow away from it? Should we understand his increasingly detailed records of natural phenomena as the research of a proto-scientist or loving attentions of a poet-naturalist? Was Thoreau a political thinker or was he ultimately more committed to nature than to human society? Did Thoreau take a mystic or a materialist view of nature?
Buell generally limns these debates without offering an easy synthesis or putting a strong thumb on the scale. Instead, taking his own advice from the opening chapter (“To rush to judgment is of course a reader's right, but it is more instructive to understand how Thoreau's thought and actions came to take the shape they did” (3), Buell encourages us to approach Thoreau's thinking as always in progress. Despite his taste for definitive-sounding pronouncements, and despite the considerable longevity his writing has enjoyed, Thoreau was never invested in “building his brand” or setting himself up as the spokesperson for a particular school of thought. This refusal may be one source of Ralph Waldo Emerson's frustration that Thoreau “had no ambition” to “engineer for all America.” As Thoreau wrote of his decision to leave his Walden cabin, “it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live.” To create a plan and stick to it (as the engineer does, or the lifelong cabin-dweller) is to arrest one's own capacity for development. Instead of attempting to distill Thoreau's thought, this book teaches us to track it. As Thoreau knew, to follow a trail is to learn how a mind works: though we may never definitively say what Thoreau thought, we can nonetheless learn how his mind moved.
As I have suggested, this is a commercial book written for those familiar with Thoreau's work. It presumes a reader who at least knows Walden and “Civil Disobedience,” and who has enough background historical knowledge to make sense of passing references to topics like “Brahmin complacency” and “the anti-supernaturalist version of Protestantism.” The sheer range of its references, its condensation of complex scholarly debates, and its comparative disinterest in supplying “colorful” biographical anecdotes, makes this an excellent choice for readers already invested in Thoreau. For these readers—Thoreau's still-robust public of enthusiasts, as well as more advanced undergraduate and graduate student—this volume is an indispensable tool and truly impressive achievement. It is a map of the wonderfully rich if sometimes bewildering wilderness of Thoreau's lifetime of writing, and a compass through the three lifetimes—and counting!—of scholarship it has inspired.