Even closer to Henry was his crony, Poet Ellery Channing, who wrote the first Thoreau biography. Channing once confessed: “I have never been able to understand what he meant by his life.” ...

It was his control over his hours, and not over his company, that defined his philosophy. In her spectacular 2017 biography, Henry David Thoreau: A Life, Laura Dassow Walls marshaled a regiment of ...