Thoreau the Arsonist #
April 13th, 2009 | In Worth Reading
I was surprised to learn that Henry David Thoreau was a pencilmaker, but this is the real meat:
On April 30, 1844, Thoreau started a blaze in the Concord Woods, scorching a 300-acre swath of earth between Fair Haven Bay and Concord. The fire was an accident, but the destruction of valuable woodland, the loss of firewood and lumber, and the narrowly avoided catastrophe that almost befell Concord itself angered the local residents and nearly ruined Thoreau’s reputation. For years afterward, Thoreau could hardly walk the streets of his hometown without hearing the epithet “woods burner.”
The portrait Pipkin paints, of an adrift and struggling writer in his mid-twenties, is an angle on Thoreau I’d never seen before.