Volume 25, Number 16 · October 26, 1978
The Two Thoreaus
By Leo Marx
Young Man Thoreau
by Richard Lebeaux
Harper Colophon Books, 262 pp., $3.95 (paper)
Until 1965, when Walter Harding's careful biography. The Days of Henry Thoreau, was published, we had nothing like a reliable, comprehensive record of Henry Thoreau's life. Richard Lebeaux is the first scholar to use that book as a basis for a fresh examination of the writer's inner life. The findings he sets forth in Young Man Thoreau point to a strikingly new, demythicired conception of the man. By carefully, matching outward circumstances and events with the way Thoreau and others perceived them—down to minute details of their day-by-day responses as recorded in diaries, letters, poems, essays—Lebeaux is able to reconstruct the psychie struggle that culminated in the experiment at Walden Pond. For the first time, accordingly, we come away from a biography with a plausible way of thinking about the relationship between the two Thoreaus: the guilt-ridden young writer who resolves the crisis of vocation by taking up his solitary residence at the pond, and that self-assured character; the narrating 'I' whose voice we first hear in the epigraph of Walden exuberantly announcing his intention not 'to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chantleleer in the morning.'
Review, 6708 words
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