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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 discovered that I had not lived.

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

Thus, throughout 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 modern, Thoreau has become emblematic of worn version of American values.

His work has been an inspiration to politicians 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 Thoreau and an American Israel, a Kathleen Burke, Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at University of London, Stephen Fender, honorary professor in English, also at University of London and Tim Morris, lecturer in American literature at the University of Dundee.

Kathy Burke Thoreau's birthplace in Concord, Massachusetts played a major role in his life and work. What kind of town was it and how are his early years spent there?

Well, Concord was, in a sense, one of the sacred places of America. During in 1775, it had seen the first shots with its neighboring village of Lexington in the American Revolution.

And indeed, Eerson, one might call, we'll talk about later, Thoreau'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, it was the same difficulty one might say when Thoreau was born. The land was bad, hard-scrabbling.

It would only support a farm with 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 sacred places, but it was also because it was so close to Boston and Cambridge.

It was an intellectual area as well because you could rapidly get to some place where you could find ideas and so forth. And it was well on its way to its present status, I think, as an intellectual bedroom community for Boston and Cambridge.

His father started off a pencil business making superior lead pencils and Thoreau worked in that factory for a while, didn't he?

That's right, we think of Thoreau as a man sort of wandering around the grass in the woods, but he was also very inventive and indeed he made the pencil a better instrument, improved the graphite center and so forth.

And I mean his father had done other things, he'd been a shopkeeper and he'd been a teacher and so forth, but he found some success in this pencil factory.

And Thoreau was connected with it, people forget, I think, that he had an entrepreneurial edge to him as well as the intellectual edge.

And we're talking about a good education educated well locally and then off to Harvard.

That's right. He was early in the family, put together the money to support this. He went early to Boston, Latin school where you learned Latin and Greek and languages and so forth and then went to Harvard at 16, which was not such an unusual thing then as it is now.

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