On Henry David Thoreau with Laura Dassow Walls

The inner lives of great people are often more mysterious and fascinating than their public lives. Dr. Gail Saltz, the author, psychoanalyst and contributor to the Today show, invites experts and brings her own expertise to bear as she examines the psychology of people who have shaped history.

“Walden. Yesterday I came here to live.” That entry from the journal of Henry David Thoreau, and the intellectual journey it began, would by themselves be enough to place Thoreau in the American pantheon. His attempt to “live deliberately” in a small woods at the edge of his hometown of Concord has been a touchstone for individualists and seekers since the publication of Walden in 1854.

But there was much more to Thoreau than his brief experiment in living at Walden Pond. A member of the vibrant intellectual circle centered on his neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson, he was also an ardent naturalist, a manual laborer and inventor, a radical political activist, and more. Laura Dassow Walls talks with Dr. Saltz about Thoreau’s quixotic, mischievous and many-sided nature. From the young man shattered by the sudden death of his brother to his death in 1862, at only forty-four years of age, meet the complex the man whose belief in human freedom and the value of labor made him an uncompromising abolitionist and the solitary walker who found society in nature.











When: Mon., Dec. 11, 2017 at 12:00 pm
Where: The 92nd Street Y, New York
1395 Lexington Ave.
212-415-5500
Price: $25
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The inner lives of great people are often more mysterious and fascinating than their public lives. Dr. Gail Saltz, the author, psychoanalyst and contributor to the Today show, invites experts and brings her own expertise to bear as she examines the psychology of people who have shaped history.

“Walden. Yesterday I came here to live.” That entry from the journal of Henry David Thoreau, and the intellectual journey it began, would by themselves be enough to place Thoreau in the American pantheon. His attempt to “live deliberately” in a small woods at the edge of his hometown of Concord has been a touchstone for individualists and seekers since the publication of Walden in 1854.

But there was much more to Thoreau than his brief experiment in living at Walden Pond. A member of the vibrant intellectual circle centered on his neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson, he was also an ardent naturalist, a manual laborer and inventor, a radical political activist, and more. Laura Dassow Walls talks with Dr. Saltz about Thoreau’s quixotic, mischievous and many-sided nature. From the young man shattered by the sudden death of his brother to his death in 1862, at only forty-four years of age, meet the complex the man whose belief in human freedom and the value of labor made him an uncompromising abolitionist and the solitary walker who found society in nature.

Buy tickets/get more info now