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.