Happy Birthday, Thoreau!

Actually, there are a lot of birthdays today, Henry David Thoreau is a personal hero of mine so he gets top billing today.

Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1817. He's best known as the author of Walden, and the essay "Civil Disobedience." Form Garrison Keiller on the Writer's Almanac:

He became the first member of his family to go to college. He went to Harvard, but didn't much care for the place. He didn't much care for school teaching either. He went to live with Ralph Waldo Emerson in Concord and did odd jobs around the house and took care of the children. It was Emerson who encouraged Thoreau to write poetry and suggested that Thoreau keep a journal, both of which Thoreau continued to do for the rest of his life.

He was 27 years old when he built that little cabin on the edge of Walden Pond and moved in, in an attempt, he said, to "Simplify, simplify, simplify ... to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach."

Also with birthday today: George Eastman, Pablo Neruda, and Julius Caesar, to name but a few.