PRAISE FOR
Expect Great Things
by Kevin Dann
A graceful, attentive inquiry into the mind of Henry David Thoreau... Dann shows an ease with the metaphysical (which is typically considered at odds with the discipline of the historian), making a warm sympathetic argument for Thoreau as a mystic and visionary and redefining his reputation.
Publishers Weekly
A reappraisal of the writers life, focusing on Thoreaus connection to, and celebration of, the invisible and ineffable... Thoreau emerges from this admiring portrait as a man richly connected to the cosmos.
Kirkus Reviews
If you think you know all about Thoreau think again. Expect Great Things reintroduces an American icon in a thoroughly fresh and vital way, bringing to crackling life a time and place full of drama, achievement, adventure, and excitement. Thoreau reached spiritual maturity in an age like our own, full of uncertainty and potential. Kevin Danns highly readable prose places Thoreau amid an assortment of eccentric characters and shows how his philosophy of solitude and nature may be more relevant today than ever before.
Gary Lachman, author of The Secret Teachers of the Western World
A vivid and beautifully written portrait not only of Thoreau but of his milieu. And it does full justice to Thoreaus nature mysticism.
Richard Smoley, author of How God Became God: What Scholars Are Really Saying About God and the Bible
Kevin Danns biography of Henry David Thoreau offers a refreshing perspective on the most down-to-earth of the Transcendentalists. Dann shows how Thoreaus free-ranging musings encompassed many of the otherworldly interests of his contemporaries, such as a fascination with faeries, mysterious appearances of gossamer, and other curiosities. Dann makes a strong case that while Thoreaus writings were grounded in tough-minded observations of nature, his own worldview and sympathetic science were far from disenchanted.
Fred Nadis, author of The Man from Mars: Ray Palmers Amazing Pulp Adventure and Wonder Shows: Performing Science, Magic, and Religion in America
Far from the well-worn paths of academic scholarship, Dann acquaints his reader with a protagonist who is an American mystic, a new-age prophet, a cosmic explorer... Dann takes the road less traveled, leading a reader into out-of-the-way places, through hidden passages in Thoreaus personal life.... Expect Great Things is eccentric, strange, even far-fetched, but nonetheless admirablea bit like Henry David Thoreau.
John Kaag, The New York Times Book Review
In plumbing Thoreaus own singular and profoundly personal quest for the infinite, [Dann] delivers keen insights. A refreshing new perspective on an American icon.
Booklist, starred review
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Copyright 2018 by Kevin Dann
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Dann, Kevin T., 1956 author.
Title: The road to Walden : 12 life lessons from a sojourn to Thoreaus cabin / Kevin Dann.
Description: New York: TarcherPerigee, [2018] |
Identifiers: LCCN 2017058109 (print) | LCCN 2018001071 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525504719 | ISBN 9780143132837 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Thoreau, Henry David, 18171862KnowledgeNatural history. | Thoreau, Henry David, 18171862Influence. | WalkingGuidebooks. | Self-realization. | BISAC: BODY, MIND & SPIRIT / Inspiration & Personal Growth. | BODY, MIND & SPIRIT / Mysticism. | TRAVEL / Special Interest / Literary.
Classification: LCC PS3057.N3 (ebook) | LCC PS3057.N3 D36 2018 (print) |
DDC 818/.309dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017058109
Cover design: Alison Forner
Cover art: Based on wood-engravings by Ethelbert White, originally published in Walden by Henry David Thoreau, Penguin Books, 1938
Version_1
For my friends at Saint Francis House,
New London, CT
Contents
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace...
Acknowledgments
I F NOT FOR THE ENTHU SIASM OF a single dedicated lover of Thoreau and of his students, Jeffrey Sinclair at Susan Wagner High School in Staten Island, and David Mahon, who asked if he could walk a while with me, I would not have taken the first step. Deep thanks to both of you. Thanks also to Joy Shaw, Gar Waterman, Walter and Phoebe Alexander, Maureen Curran, Bobby Matherne, and Paul Swanson for helping to put this pilgrim on the road. Margaret Carroll-Bergmann, director of Thoreau Farm, gave me a destinationand the sweetest invitation to sing I have ever received.
I am grateful for the wit, wisdom, and whimsy of dear friends: Jeff Prant, Ian Clyne, Jim Wetmore, Robert Powell, Lacquanna Paul, Len Raymond, Grace Panko, and Cathline Marshall. Thanks to Mitch Horowitz for inviting me out of bounds.
The pilgrim at each step lives on the kindness of strangers, whose acts of hospitality transform them into friends. Thanks to Mazen and to all those who came out to celebrate the Captain of a Huckleberry Party along the road to Walden; to Madhu Gupta, Michele Van Epps, Julie Menders, Margaret Morrissey, and your helpful public library staffs; and to all those who gave comfort, conversation, and compassion along the way.
Preface
T HOREAU B EL IEVED IN F AIRIES proclaimed the January 13, 2017, Wall Street Journal headline for the review of Expect Great Things, my biography of Henry David Thoreau. Though not quite as scornful as a 2016 New Yorker essay about Thoreau entitled Pond Scum, that WSJ headline suggested that the sage of Concord might not get a fair hearing in New York City, even in his bicentennial year. Perennially misunderstood since his death at age forty-four in 1862, Thoreau had a tough time getting a fair hearing even in his own lifetime. In his eulogy for Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson lamented that instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry party. Despite his affection for his protg, Emerson was put off by Henrys wild ways; subsequent generations have embraced Thoreaus quests for outer wildness, while slighting his paramount fidelity to inner wildness. His carefully cultivated inner wildness is what made Henry both happy Captain of Huckleberry Parties and ardent abolitionist content to go to jail rather than pay a poll tax in support of slavery.
In 2017, two hundred years after Thoreaus birth, it struck me that America could use a few more huckleberry parties, impromptu gatherings where a circle of neighborssome strangers to one anothermight amble out in search of sun-ripened sweet fruit, singing songs and reciting poetry. Rather than organize a book tour, I thought that the best way to honor my boyhood hero in his bicentennial year would be to christen myself Captain of a Huckleberry Party, commit Henrys favorite song and a few of his poems to memory, and, traveling lightmy down bag and battered inflatable sleeping pad the main necessities in my thirty-year-old frameless climbing packset out on a celebratory twelve-day walking pilgrimage from my birthplaceManhattanto hisConcord, Massachusetts. Those 235 miles traversed no barren Cape Cod dunes nor deep Maine spruce forests, but dozens of suburban New England communities whose character and history might be counted upon to yield insights about what America has become since Thoreaus time.