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I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, quote, I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential

facts of life and not when I came to die discover that I had not lived.

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.

Thus wrote the American writer and philosopher Henry David Thoreau in his seminal work Walden, published in 1854.

A fierce opponent of slavery, a champion of the simple life, a lover of nature and an enemy of the and writers alike from Martin Luther King to Gandhi, Yates and Tolstoy.

Yet in many ways Thoreau remains a mystery, a man of contradictions who advocated self-sufficiency, but

was happy now and then to let others including his mother to do his washing and

cook his meals. With me to discuss thorough and an American idol,

I'm Kathleen Burke, professor of Modern and Contemporary History at University College London, Stephen Fender,

Honorary Professor in English, also at University of London and Tim Morris Lecturer in

American Literature at the University of Dundee. Cathayberg Thoreau's birthplace in Concord, Massachusetts, played a major role in his life and work.

What kind of town was it and how his early years spent there?

Well, Concord was, in a sense, one of the sacred places of America.

In 1775, it had seen the first shots with its neighboring village of Lexington in the American Revolution.

And indeed, Emerson, one whom one might call, we'll talk about later, Thoro's mentor, wrote in the

Concord hymn, this was where the embattled farmer stood and fired the shot heard round the world.

Now in 1775 the town was a declining town, and it always, it was the same difficulty one might say when Thoreau was born. The land was bad,

hard-scrabbling. It would only support a farm would support one family, so youth left.

Boys had to go elsewhere to find a place to live.

After the revolution for about 20 years you saw a real surge of prosperity and that's when roads were straightened and there was more building.

But when Thoreau was born it was again in the grip of depression one might say and by the time he is born it's iconic again because of the

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