Writing a Paper on Thoreau

It really isn't very difficult to work up a paper or a class presentation on Thoreau. A little cleverness and a little work is all it takes...

I'm no expert on Thoreau, but I do know some things about him and his work. He's entertaining and interesting. He has been important in a number of ways. His ideas have found their way into civil rights and environmental movements around the world. Civil Disobedience is an important work of political philosophy and Walden is an important work of nature writing. No one can be a serious scholar without reading those two works. Because he resisted paying a tax out of a conscientious objection to the Mexican War, and because he was the spiritual ancestor of founders of the conservation movement in the United States, his work gained considerable popularity in the 1960's due to opposition to the Vietnam War and the establishment of the first Earth Day. Thoreau is also closely identified with Transcendentalism, and he derived much of his thinking from unusual (at his time) sources that had just recently been published in English, such as Buddhist and Hindu texts. He was concerned with what had been done to American Indians and African slaves, and was outspoken about it. He was a social critic on par with Jonathan Swift and Oscar Wilde, although he wasn't a satirist. He did not read fiction because he felt that it was frivolous and that he didn't have time to read all of the nonfiction he wanted to read. That's enough for starters.

Now here's what you do. Take any one of these topics. Find an appropriate passage, section, essay or book by Thoreau and link it with the other end of the topic. Warning: you will have to do some reading. Don't forget that there is a ton of criticism on Thoreau, so you might want to start by browsing through it until you see a topic that interests you. Don't be too broad or too narrow. For example, don't pick a topic like "Thoreau's influence on the environmental movement" unless you plan to write a book. Instead, pick a topic like "Thoreau's influence on Annie Dillard" (would make a good paper, actually) or on Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Thomas Merton, etc. Once you have all or most of your research done, come and bounce it off the Thoreau fans on a chat board. Of course, there's always the danger that by that time you won't need any help.
 

Fred Musante is a journalist and a teacher of writing and English.

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