Paris Review - The Art of Biography

What did you do? I was asked to draw up a fifty-page leaflet on Thoreau. I did a propagate of information, and rereading. I came to him kinda freshly. The biographers had been using their true image of him for a long time. He had be take after re each(prenominal)y popular in the 1960s. He was at the center of ii myths: one was that he had built his army hut in the natural state and escaped from the tyrannies of well-manneredization. The other(a) was that he went to dawdle to defy a form of revenue and so stood up for civil disobedience. twain myths had in them non the truths of what Thoreau did, but the wishes of some Americans at the time. When I had looked afresh at all the data, it was snuff it Thoreau had not locomote into the wilderness. He travel one naut mi from his home into the wood at Walden Pond, at heart walking exceed of the life he had al itinerarys led. So it was a gesture. And his civil disobedience had been comfortably rewritten, as it were, by Gandhi, and it had worked for Gandhi. I wasnt essay to debunk the fantasy of Thoreaus myths, but I see that Thoreau himself wasnt at all the Thoreau of apologue which biographers and folklore had built up. The biographers had all told the story of how Thoreau, in a dry season, fried some fish in a steer trunk and good deal fire to the accordance woods. What I saw was that he had come to be detest by the townspeople, that he was a musing narcissist with to a greater extent feeling for trees and plants than for humans. I had asked myself the question: why did he real at that flake of his life cause a burl down the way to the edge of the syndicate? The answer was because he had become truly unpopular in the town. \nHow did you arrive at your conclusions? I arrived at my conclusionsthey have been picked up since by othersby reading the psychological signs and signals of Thoreaus constitution and his actions.