Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau led the charge against Old World ideas in "The Transcendentalists and Their World," by Robert A. Gross.
Thoreau believed in practicing what he preached. He refused to pay a poll tax because it went to a government that supported slavery and spent a night in jail for his protest. It formed the seed of his book “Civil Disobedience.” Bettman/Getty Images/HowStuffworks
Henry David Thoreau is one of America s most beloved and misunderstood writers. He s famous for retreating to a rustic cabin at Walden Pond in the Massachusetts woods for two years to ruminate on nature and philosophy, but Thoreau wasn t a hermit or a cranky misanthrope. He was, in a word, a questioner, says Jeffrey S. Cramer, curator of collections at the Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods, and author or editor of nearly a dozen books about Thoreau and his Transcendentalist friend Ralph Waldo Emerson.