name	Ox Bel Ha Cave System
location	Quintana Roo, Mexico
depth
length
survey	Grupo de Exploración Ox Bel Ha
discovery	February 1996
geology	Limestone
number of entrances	133 Cenotes
difficulty	Advanced cave diving
access	}}

Ox Bel Ha (from Mayan meaning "Three Paths of Water"; officially Sistema Ox Bel Ha) is a cave system in Quintana Roo, Mexico. It is the longest explored underwater cave in the world and ranking no. 4 including dry caves. As of June 2011 the surveyed length is of underwater passages.

Notes

Category:Caves of Mexico Category:Limestone caves Category:Natural history of Quintana Roo Category:Underwater diving sites

de:Sistema Ox Bel Ha

Region	Western Philosophy
Era	19th century philosophy
Color	#B0C4DE
Name	Henry David Thoreau
Birth date	July 12, 1817
Birth place	Concord, Massachusetts
Death date	May 06, 1862
Death place	Concord, Massachusetts
School tradition	Transcendentalism
Main interests	Natural history, Unitarianism
Notable ideas	Abolitionism, tax resistance, development criticism, civil disobedience, conscientious objection, direct action, environmentalism, anarchism, simple living
Influences	Plotinus, Indian philosophy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Virgil, Goethe, Thomas Carlyle
Influenced	Mahatma Gandhi, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, William Butler Yeats, Sinclair Lewis, John Zerzan, Ernest Hemingway, Upton Sinclair, Emma Goldman, Émile Armand, E. B. White, E. O. Wilson, B. F. Skinner, George Bernard Shaw, Christopher McCandless}}

Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist. He is best known for his book ''Walden'', a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay ''Civil Disobedience'', an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state.

Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry total over 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions were his writings on natural history and philosophy, where he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern day environmentalism. His literary style interweaves close natural observation, personal experience, pointed rhetoric, symbolic meanings, and historical lore, while displaying a poetic sensibility, philosophical austerity, and "Yankee" love of practical detail. He was also deeply interested in the idea of survival in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay; at the same time he advocated abandoning waste and illusion in order to discover life's true essential needs.

He was a lifelong abolitionist, delivering lectures that attacked the Fugitive Slave Law while praising the writings of Wendell Phillips and defending abolitionist John Brown. Thoreau's philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced the political thoughts and actions of such notable figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Thoreau is sometimes cited as an individualist anarchist. Though ''Civil Disobedience'' seems to call for improving rather than abolishing government – "I ask for, not at once no government, but ''at once'' a better government" – the direction of this improvement points toward anarchism: "'That government is best which governs not at all;' and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have." Richard Drinnon partly blames Thoreau for the ambiguity, noting that Thoreau's "sly satire, his liking for wide margins for his writing, and his fondness for paradox provided ammunition for widely divergent interpretations of 'Civil Disobedience.'"

Early life and education

He was born David Henry Thoreau in Concord, Massachusetts, into the "modest New England family" of John Thoreau (a pencil maker) and Cynthia Dunbar. His paternal grandfather was of French origin and was born in Jersey. His maternal grandfather, Asa Dunbar, led Harvard's 1766 student "Butter Rebellion", the first recorded student protest in the Colonies. David Henry was named after a recently deceased paternal uncle, David Thoreau. He did not become "Henry David" until after college, although he never petitioned to make a legal name change. He had two older siblings, Helen and John Jr., and a younger sister, Sophia. Thoreau's birthplace still exists on Virginia Road in Concord and is currently the focus of preservation efforts. The house is original, but it now stands about 100 yards away from its first site.

Thoreau studied at Harvard University between 1833 and 1837. He lived in Hollis Hall and took courses in rhetoric, classics, philosophy, mathematics, and science. A legend proposes that Thoreau refused to pay the five-dollar fee for a Harvard diploma. In fact, the master's degree he declined to purchase had no academic merit: Harvard College offered it to graduates "who proved their physical worth by being alive three years after graduating, and their saving, earning, or inheriting quality or condition by having Five Dollars to give the college." His comment was: "Let every sheep keep its own skin", a reference to the tradition of diplomas being written on sheepskin vellum.

Name pronunciation and appearance

Amos Bronson Alcott and Thoreau's aunt each wrote that "Thoreau" is pronounced like the word "thorough". Although in current media (standard American English) this word rhymes with "furrow", Edward Emerson wrote that the name should be pronounced "Thó-row, the ''h'' sounded, and accent on the first syllable." This would in fact rhyme with "thorough" as pronounced in 19th century New England.

In appearance he was homely, with a nose that he called "my most prominent feature." Of his face, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote: "[Thoreau] is as ugly as sin, long-nosed, queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and rustic, though courteous manners, corresponding very well with such an exterior. But his ugliness is of an honest and agreeable fashion, and becomes him much better than beauty." Thoreau also wore a neck-beard for many years, which he insisted many women found attractive. However, Louisa May Alcott mentioned to Ralph Waldo Emerson that Thoreau's facial hair "will most assuredly deflect amorous advances and preserve the man's virtue in perpetuity."

Return to Concord: 1837–1841

The traditional professions open to college graduates—law, the church, business, medicine—failed to interest Thoreau, so in 1835 he took a leave of absence from Harvard, during which he taught school in Canton, Massachusetts. After he graduated in 1837, he joined the faculty of the Concord public school, but resigned after a few weeks rather than administer corporal punishment. He and his brother John then opened a grammar school in Concord in 1838 called Concord Academy. They introduced several progressive concepts, including nature walks and visits to local shops and businesses. The school ended when John became fatally ill from tetanus in 1842 after cutting himself while shaving. He died in his brother Henry's arms.

Upon graduation Thoreau returned home to Concord, where he met Ralph Waldo Emerson through a mutual friend. Emerson took a paternal and at times patronizing interest in Thoreau, advising the young man and introducing him to a circle of local writers and thinkers, including Ellery Channing, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne and his son Julian Hawthorne, who was a boy at the time.

Emerson urged Thoreau to contribute essays and poems to a quarterly periodical, ''The Dial'', and Emerson lobbied editor Margaret Fuller to publish those writings. Thoreau's first essay published there was ''Aulus Persius Flaccus,'' an essay on the playwright of the same name, published in ''The Dial'' in July 1840. It consisted of revised passages from his journal, which he had begun keeping at Emerson's suggestion. The first journal entry on October 22, 1837, reads, "'What are you doing now?' he asked. 'Do you keep a journal?' So I make my first entry to-day."

Thoreau was a philosopher of nature and its relation to the human condition. In his early years he followed Transcendentalism, a loose and eclectic idealist philosophy advocated by Emerson, Fuller, and Alcott. They held that an ideal spiritual state transcends, or goes beyond, the physical and empirical, and that one achieves that insight via personal intuition rather than religious doctrine. In their view, Nature is the outward sign of inward spirit, expressing the "radical correspondence of visible things and human thoughts," as Emerson wrote in ''Nature'' (1836).

On April 18, 1841, Thoreau moved into the Emerson house. There, from 1841–1844, he served as the children's tutor, editorial assistant, and repair man/gardener. For a few months in 1843, he moved to the home of William Emerson on Staten Island, and tutored the family sons while seeking contacts among literary men and journalists in the city who might help publish his writings, including his future literary representative Horace Greeley.

Thoreau returned to Concord and worked in his family's pencil factory, which he continued to do for most of his adult life. He rediscovered the process to make a good pencil out of inferior graphite by using clay as the binder; this invention improved upon graphite found in New Hampshire and bought in 1821 by relative Charles Dunbar. (The process of mixing graphite and clay, known as the Conté process, was patented by Nicolas-Jacques Conté in 1795). His other source had been Tantiusques, an Indian operated mine in Sturbridge, Massachusetts. Later, Thoreau converted the factory to produce plumbago (graphite), which was used to ink typesetting machines.

Once back in Concord, Thoreau went through a restless period. In April 1844 he and his friend Edward Hoar accidentally set a fire that consumed of Walden Woods. He spoke often of finding a farm to buy or lease, which he felt would give him a means to support himself while also providing enough solitude to write his first book.

Civil Disobedience and the Walden years: 1845–1849

Thoreau needed to concentrate and get himself working more on his writing. In March 1845, Ellery Channing told Thoreau, "Go out upon that, build yourself a hut, & there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no other alternative, no other hope for you." Two months later, Thoreau embarked on a two-year experiment in simple living on July 4, 1845, when he moved to a small, self-built house on land owned by Emerson in a second-growth forest around the shores of Walden Pond. The house was in "a pretty pasture and woodlot" of that Emerson had bought, from his family home.

On July 24 or July 25, 1846, Thoreau ran into the local tax collector, Sam Staples, who asked him to pay six years of delinquent poll taxes. Thoreau refused because of his opposition to the Mexican-American War and slavery, and he spent a night in jail because of this refusal. (The next day Thoreau was freed, against his wishes, when his aunt paid his taxes.) The experience had a strong impact on Thoreau. In January and February 1848, he delivered lectures on "The Rights and Duties of the Individual in relation to Government" explaining his tax resistance at the Concord Lyceum. Bronson Alcott attended the lecture, writing in his journal on January 26: :

Thoreau revised the lecture into an essay entitled ''Resistance to Civil Government'' (also known as ''Civil Disobedience''). In May 1849 it was published by Elizabeth Peabody in the ''Aesthetic Papers''. Thoreau had taken up a version of Percy Shelley's principle in the political poem ''The Mask of Anarchy'' (1819), that Shelley begins with the powerful images of the unjust forms of authority of his time – and then imagines the stirrings of a radically new form of social action.

At Walden Pond, he completed a first draft of ''A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers'', an elegy to his brother, John, that described their 1839 trip to the White Mountains. Thoreau did not find a publisher for this book and instead printed 1,000 copies at his own expense, though fewer than 300 were sold. Thoreau self-published on the advice of Emerson, using Emerson's own publisher, Munroe, who did little to publicize the book.

In August 1846, Thoreau briefly left Walden to make a trip to Mount Katahdin in Maine, a journey later recorded in "Ktaadn," the first part of ''The Maine Woods''.

Thoreau left Walden Pond on September 6, 1847. At Emerson's request, he immediately moved back into the Emerson house to help Lidian manage the household while her husband was on an extended trip to Europe. Over several years, he worked to pay off his debts and also continuously revised his manuscript for what, in 1854, he would publish as ''Walden, or Life in the Woods'', recounting the two years, two months, and two days he had spent at Walden Pond. The book compresses that time into a single calendar year, using the passage of four seasons to symbolize human development. Part memoir and part spiritual quest, ''Walden'' at first won few admirers, but later critics have regarded it as a classic American work that explores natural simplicity, harmony, and beauty as models for just social and cultural conditions.

American poet Robert Frost wrote of Thoreau, "In one book ... he surpasses everything we have had in America."

John Updike wrote in 2004,

Thoreau moved out of Emerson's house in July 1848 and stayed at a home on Belknap Street nearby. In 1850, he and his family moved into a home at 255 Main Street; he stayed there until his death.

Later years: 1851–1862

In 1851, Thoreau became increasingly fascinated with natural history and travel/expedition narratives. He read avidly on botany and often wrote observations on this topic into his journal. He admired William Bartram, and Charles Darwin's ''Voyage of the Beagle''. He kept detailed observations on Concord's nature lore, recording everything from how the fruit ripened over time to the fluctuating depths of Walden Pond and the days certain birds migrated. The point of this task was to "anticipate" the seasons of nature, in his words.

He became a land surveyor and continued to write increasingly detailed natural history observations about the township in his journal, a two-million word document he kept for 24 years. He also kept a series of notebooks, and these observations became the source for Thoreau's late natural history writings, such as ''Autumnal Tints'', ''The Succession of Trees'', and ''Wild Apples'', an essay lamenting the destruction of indigenous and wild apple species.

Until the 1970s, literary critics dismissed Thoreau's late pursuits as amateur science and philosophy. With the rise of environmental history and ecocriticism, several new readings of this matter began to emerge, showing Thoreau to be both a philosopher and an analyst of ecological patterns in fields and woodlots. For instance, his late essay, "The Succession of Forest Trees," shows that he used experimentation and analysis to explain how forests regenerate after fire or human destruction, through dispersal by seed-bearing winds or animals.

He traveled to Quebec once, Cape Cod four times, and Maine three times; these landscapes inspired his "excursion" books, ''A Yankee in Canada'', ''Cape Cod'', and ''The Maine Woods'', in which travel itineraries frame his thoughts about geography, history and philosophy. Other travels took him southwest to Philadelphia and New York City in 1854, and west across the Great Lakes region in 1861, visiting Niagara Falls, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Mackinac Island. Although provincial in his physical travels, he was extraordinarily well-read and vicariously a world traveler. He obsessively devoured all the first-hand travel accounts available in his day, at a time when the last unmapped regions of the earth were being explored. He read Magellan and James Cook, the arctic explorers Franklin, Mackenzie and Parry, David Livingstone and Richard Francis Burton on Africa, Lewis and Clark; and hundreds of lesser-known works by explorers and literate travelers. Astonishing amounts of global reading fed his endless curiosity about the peoples, cultures, religions and natural history of the world, and left its traces as commentaries in his voluminous journals. He processed everything he read, in the local laboratory of his Concord experience. Among his famous aphorisms is his advice to "live at home like a traveler."

After John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry, many prominent voices in the abolitionist movement distanced themselves from Brown, or damned him with faint praise. Thoreau was disgusted by this, and he composed a speech—''A Plea for Captain John Brown''—which was uncompromising in its defense of Brown and his actions. Thoreau's speech proved persuasive: first the abolitionist movement began to accept Brown as a martyr, and by the time of the American Civil War entire armies of the North were literally singing Brown's praises. As a contemporary biographer of John Brown put it: "If, as Alfred Kazin suggests, without John Brown there would have been no Civil War, we would add that without the Concord Transcendentalists, John Brown would have had little cultural impact."

Death

Thoreau contracted tuberculosis in 1835 and suffered from it sporadically afterwards. In 1859, following a late night excursion to count the rings of tree stumps during a rain storm, he became ill with bronchitis. His health declined over three years with brief periods of remission, until he eventually became bedridden. Recognizing the terminal nature of his disease, Thoreau spent his last years revising and editing his unpublished works, particularly ''The Maine Woods'' and ''Excursions'', and petitioning publishers to print revised editions of ''A Week'' and ''Walden''. He also wrote letters and journal entries until he became too weak to continue. His friends were alarmed at his diminished appearance and were fascinated by his tranquil acceptance of death. When his aunt Louisa asked him in his last weeks if he had made his peace with God, Thoreau responded: "I did not know we had ever quarreled."

Aware he was dying, Thoreau's last words were "Now comes good sailing", followed by two lone words, "moose" and "Indian". He died on May 6, 1862 at age 44. Bronson Alcott planned the service and read selections from Thoreau's works, and Channing presented a hymn. Emerson wrote the eulogy spoken at his funeral. Originally buried in the Dunbar family plot, he and members of his immediate family were eventually moved to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery (N42° 27' 53.7" W71° 20' 33") in Concord, Massachusetts.

Thoreau's friend Ellery Channing published his first biography, ''Thoreau the Poet-Naturalist'', in 1873, and Channing and another friend Harrison Blake edited some poems, essays, and journal entries for posthumous publication in the 1890s. Thoreau's journals, which he often mined for his published works but which remained largely unpublished at his death, were first published in 1906 and helped to build his modern reputation. A new, expanded edition of the journals is underway, published by Princeton University Press. Today, Thoreau is regarded as one of the foremost American writers, both for the modern clarity of his prose style and the prescience of his views on nature and politics. His memory is honored by the international Thoreau Society.

Personal beliefs

Thoreau was an early advocate of recreational hiking and canoeing, of conserving natural resources on private land, and of preserving wilderness as public land. Thoreau was also one of the first American supporters of Darwin's theory of evolution. He was not a strict vegetarian, though he said he preferred that diet and advocated it as a means of self-improvement. He wrote in ''Walden'': "The practical objection to animal food in my case was its uncleanness; and besides, when I had caught and cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me essentially. It was insignificant and unnecessary, and cost more than it came to. A little bread or a few potatoes would have done as well, with less trouble and filth." Thoreau neither rejected civilization nor fully embraced wilderness. Instead he sought a middle ground, the pastoral realm that integrates both nature and culture. His philosophy required that he be a didactic arbitration between the wilderness he based so much on and the spreading mass of North American humanity. He decried the latter endlessly but felt the teachers need to be close to those who needed to hear what he wanted to tell them. He was in many ways a 'visible saint', a point of contact with the wilds, even if the land he lived on had been given to him by Emerson and was far from cut-off. The wildness he enjoyed was the nearby swamp or forest, and he preferred "partially cultivated country." His idea of being "far in the recesses of the wilderness" of Maine was to "travel the logger's path and the Indian trail," but he also hiked on pristine untouched land. In the essay "Henry David Thoreau, Philosopher" Roderick Nash writes: "Thoreau left Concord in 1846 for the first of three trips to northern Maine. His expectations were high because he hoped to find genuine, primeval America. But contact with real wilderness in Maine affected him far differently than had the idea of wilderness in Concord. Instead of coming out of the woods with a deepened appreciation of the wilds, Thoreau felt a greater respect for civilization and realized the necessity of balance." On alcohol, Thoreau wrote: "I would fain keep sober always... I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man; wine is not so noble a liquor... Of all ebriosity, who does not prefer to be intoxicated by the air he breathes?"

Social and political influence

Thoreau's political writings had little impact during his lifetime, as "his contemporaries did not see him as a theorist or as a radical, viewing him instead as a naturalist. They either dismissed or ignored his political essays, including ''Civil Disobedience''. The only two complete books (as opposed to essays) published in his lifetime, ''Walden'' and ''A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers'' (1849), both dealt with nature, in which he loved to wander." Nevertheless, Thoreau's writings went on to influence many public figures. Political leaders and reformers like Mahatma Gandhi, President John F. Kennedy, civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr., Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, and Russian author Leo Tolstoy all spoke of being strongly affected by Thoreau's work, particularly ''Civil Disobedience'', as did "right-wing theorist Frank Chodorov [who] devoted an entire issue of his monthly, ''Analysis'', to an appreciation of Thoreau." Thoreau also influenced many artists and authors including Edward Abbey, Willa Cather, Marcel Proust, William Butler Yeats, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Upton Sinclair, E. B. White, Lewis Mumford, Frank Lloyd Wright, Alexander Posey and Gustav Stickley. Thoreau also influenced naturalists like John Burroughs, John Muir, E. O. Wilson, Edwin Way Teale, Joseph Wood Krutch, B. F. Skinner, David Brower and Loren Eiseley, whom ''Publishers Weekly'' called "the modern Thoreau." English writer Henry Stephens Salt wrote a biography of Thoreau in 1890, which popularized Thoreau's ideas in Britain: George Bernard Shaw, Edward Carpenter and Robert Blatchford were among those who became Thoreau enthusiasts as a result of Salt's advocacy.

Mahatma Gandhi first read ''Walden'' in 1906 while working as a civil rights activist in Johannesburg, South Africa. He first read ''Civil Disobedience'' "while he sat in a South African prison for the crime of nonviolently protesting discrimination against the Indian population in the Transvaal. The essay galvanized Gandhi, who wrote and published a synopsis of Thoreau's argument, calling its 'incisive logic . . . unanswerable' and referring to Thoreau as 'one of the greatest and most moral men America has produced.'" He told American reporter Webb Miller, "[Thoreau's] ideas influenced me greatly. I adopted some of them and recommended the study of Thoreau to all of my friends who were helping me in the cause of Indian Independence. Why I actually took the name of my movement from Thoreau's essay 'On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,' written about 80 years ago."

Martin Luther King, Jr. noted in his autobiography that his first encounter with the idea of non-violent resistance was reading "On Civil Disobedience" in 1944 while attending Morehouse College. He wrote in his autobiography that it was

Here, in this courageous New Englander's refusal to pay his taxes and his choice of jail rather than support a war that would spread slavery's territory into Mexico, I made my first contact with the theory of nonviolent resistance. Fascinated by the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil system, I was so deeply moved that I reread the work several times.

I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. No other person has been more eloquent and passionate in getting this idea across than Henry David Thoreau. As a result of his writings and personal witness, we are the heirs of a legacy of creative protest. The teachings of Thoreau came alive in our civil rights movement; indeed, they are more alive than ever before. Whether expressed in a sit-in at lunch counters, a freedom ride into Mississippi, a peaceful protest in Albany, Georgia, a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, these are outgrowths of Thoreau's insistence that evil must be resisted and that no moral man can patiently adjust to injustice.

American psychologist B. F. Skinner wrote that he carried a copy of Thoreau's ''Walden'' with him in his youth. and, in 1945, wrote ''Walden Two'', a fictional utopia about 1,000 members of a community living together inspired by the life of Thoreau. Thoreau and his fellow Transcendentalists from Concord were a major inspiration of the composer Charles Ives. The 4th movement of the Concord Sonata for piano (with a part for flute, Thoreau's instrument) is a character picture and he also set Thoreau's words.

Anarchism

Thoreau's ideas have impacted and resonated with various strains in the anarchist movement, with Emma Goldman referring to him as "the greatest American anarchist." Green anarchism and Anarcho-primitivism in particular have both derived inspiration and ecological points-of-view from the writings of Thoreau. John Zerzan included Thoreau's text "Excursions" (1863) in his edited compilation of works in the anarcho-primitivist tradition titled ''Against civilization: Readings and reflections''. Additionally, Murray Rothbard, the founder of anarcho-capitalism, has opined that Thoreau was one of the "great intellectual heroes" of his movement. Thoreau was also an important influence on late 19th century anarchist naturism. While globally, Thoreau's concepts also held importance within individualist anarchist circles in Spain, France, and Portugal.

Contemporary critics

Although his writings would later receive widespread acclaim, Thoreau's ideas were not universally applauded by some of his contemporaries in literary circles. Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson judged Thoreau's endorsement of living alone and apart from modern society in natural simplicity to be a mark of "unmanly" effeminacy and "womanish solitude", while deeming him a self-indulgent "skulker." Nathaniel Hawthorne was also critical of Thoreau, writing that he "repudiated all regular modes of getting a living, and seems inclined to lead a sort of Indian life among civilized men." In a similar vein, poet John Greenleaf Whittier detested what he deemed to be the "wicked" and "heathenish" message of ''Walden'', decreeing that Thoreau wanted man to "lower himself to the level of a woodchuck and walk on four legs."

In response to such criticisms, English novelist George Eliot, writing for the ''Westminster Review'', characterized such critics as uninspired and narrow-minded:

People—very wise in their own eyes—who would have every man's life ordered according to a particular pattern, and who are intolerant of every existence the utility of which is not palpable to them, may pooh-pooh Mr. Thoreau and this episode in his history, as unpractical and dreamy.

Works

''Aulus Persius Flaccus'' (1840) ''The Service'' (1840) ''A Walk to Wachusett'' (1842) ''Paradise (to be) Regained'' (1843) ''The Landlord'' (1843)

''Sir Walter Raleigh'' (1844)

''Herald of Freedom'' (1844) ''Wendell Phillips Before the Concord Lyceum'' (1845)

''Reform and the Reformers'' (1846–48)

''Thomas Carlyle and His Works'' (1847) ''A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers'' (1849) ''Resistance to Civil Government'', or ''Civil Disobedience'' (1849) ''An Excursion to Canada'' (1853) ''Slavery in Massachusetts'' (1854) ''Walden'' (1854) ''A Plea for Captain John Brown'' (1859) ''Remarks After the Hanging of John Brown'' (1859) ''The Last Days of John Brown'' (1860) ''Walking'' (1861) ''Autumnal Tints'' (1862) ''Wild Apples: The History of the Apple Tree'' (1862) ''Excursions'' (1863) ''Life Without Principle'' (1863) ''Night and Moonlight'' (1863)

''The Highland Light'' (1864)

''The Maine Woods'' (1864) ''Cape Cod'' (1865) ''Letters to Various Persons'' (1865) ''A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers'' (1866)

''Early Spring in Massachusetts'' (1881)

''Summer'' (1884) ''Winter'' (1888) ''Autumn'' (1892) ''Miscellanies'' (1894) ''Familiar Letters of Henry David Thoreau'' (1894)

''Poems of Nature'' (1895)

''Some Unpublished Letters of Henry D. and Sophia E. Thoreau'' (1898)

''The First and Last Journeys of Thoreau'' (1905) ''Journal of Henry David Thoreau'' (1906) ''The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau'' edited by Walter Harding and Carl Bode (Washington Square: New York University Press, 1958)

See also

American philosophy

List of American philosophers

References

Further reading

Bode, Carl. ''Best of Thoreau's Journals''. Southern Illinois University Press. 1967

Botkin, Daniel. ''No Man's Garden''

Dean, Bradley P. ed., ''Letters to a Spiritual Seeker''. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004.

Harding, Walter. ''The Days of Henry Thoreau''. Princeton University Press, 1982

Hendrix, George. "The Influence of Thoreau's 'Civil Disobedience' on Gandhi's Satyagraha." ''The New England Quarterly''. 1956

Howarth, William. ''The Book of Concord: Thoreau's Life as a Writer''. Viking Press, 1982

Myerson, Joel et al. ''The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau''. Cambridge University Press. 1995

Nash, Roderick. ''Henry David Thoreau, Philosopher''

Parrington, Vernon. ''Main Current in American Thought''. V 2 online. 1927

Petroski, Henry. "H. D. Thoreau, Engineer." ''American Heritage of Invention and Technology'', Vol. 5, No. 2, pp. 8–16

Richardson, Robert D. ''Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind''. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles. 1986. ISBN 0-520-06346-5

Tauber, Alfred I. ''Henry David Thoreau and the Moral Agency of Knowing''. University of California, Berkeley. 2001. ISBN 0-520-23915-6

Thoreau, Henry David. ''Collected Essays and Poems''. Elizabeth Hall Witherell, editor, Library of America, 2001) ISBN 978-1-883011-95-6

_____. ''I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau''. Jeffrey S. Cramer, editor, Yale University Press, 2007

_____. ''The Maine Woods: A Fully Annotated Edition''. Jeffrey S. Cramer, editor, Yale University Press, 2009

_____. ''Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition''. Jeffrey S. Cramer, editor, Yale University Press, 2004

_____. ''A Week, Walden, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod''. Robert F. Sayre, editor, Library of America, 1985 ISBN 0-940450-27-5

_____. ''The Price of Freedom: Excerpts from Thoreau's Journals'' ISBN 978-1-4348-0552-2

Walls, Laura Dassow. ''Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and 19th Century Science''. University of Wisconsin. 1995. ISBN 0-299-14744-4

Ridl, Jack. "Moose. Indian." Scintilla (poem on Thoreau's last words)

Historical fiction

Brooks, Geraldine. ''March: A Love Story in a Time of War'' (2006)

External links

The Thoreau Society

The Thoreau Edition

The Thoreau Project

The Walden Woods Project by The Thoreau Institute

The Thoreau Farm Trust – His Birthplace

The Disarming Honesty of Henry David Thoreau, by Frank Chodorov

This Date From Henry David Thoreau's Journal

Who He Was & Why He Matters – by Randall Conrad

H D Thoreau – "a site for everything Thoreau"

Henry David Thoreau – by the ''Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy''

Henry Thoreau: Transcendental Economist by Vernon L. Parrington

FAQ with Answers about Thoreau

Emerson & Thoreau at C-SPAN's ''American Writers: A Journey Through History''

Texts

The Thoreau Reader by ''The Thoreau Society''

The Writings of Henry David Thoreau at ''The Walden Woods Project''

The Writings of Henry David Thoreau at ''Princeton University Press''

Political & Philosophical Excerpts from Thoreau's Journals

Reflections on a Child's Water Wheel – an Excerpt from Thoreau's 1848 Journal

Scans of Thoreau's Land Surveys at the Concord Free Public Library

Henry David Thoreau Online – The Works and Life of Henry D. Thoreau

Works by Thoreau at Open Library

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name	Giosuè Alessandro Michele Carducci
awards
birth date	July 27, 1835
birth place	Valdicastello di Pietrasanta, Tuscany, Italy
death date	February 16, 1907
death place	Bologna, Italy
occupation	Poet
nationality	Italian }}

Giosuè Alessandro Michele Carducci (27 July 1835 – 16 February 1907) was an Italian poet and teacher. He was very influential and was regarded as the official national poet of modern Italy. In 1906 he became the first Italian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Biography

He was born in Valdicastello (part of Pietrasanta), a small town in the Province of Lucca in the northwest corner of the region of Tuscany. His father, a doctor, was an advocate of the unification of Italy and was involved with the Carbonari. Because of his politics, the family was forced to move several times during Carducci's childhood, eventually settling for a few years in Florence.

From the time he was in college, he was fascinated with the restrained style of Greek and Roman antiquity, and his mature work reflects a restrained classical style, often using the classical meters of such Latin poets as Horace and Virgil. He translated Book 9 of Homer's ''Iliad'' into Italian.

He graduated in 1856 from the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa and began teaching school. The following year, he published his first collection of poems, ''Rime''. These were difficult years for Carducci: his father died, and his brother committed suicide.

In 1859, he married Elvira Menicucci, and they had four children. He briefly taught Greek at a high school in Pistoia, and then was appointed Italian professor at the university in Bologna. Here, one of his students was Giovanni Pascoli, who became a poet himself and later succeeded him at the university. Carducci was a popular lecturer and a fierce critic of literature and society. His political views were consistently opposed to Christianity generally and the secular power of the Catholic Church in particular.

I know neither truth of God nor peace with the Vatican or any priests. They are the real and unaltering enemies of Italy.

he said in his later years. This anti-clerical revolutionary zeal is prominently showcased in one famous poem, the deliberately blasphemous and provocative "Inno a Satana" (or "Hymn to Satan".) The poem was composed in 1863 as a dinner party toast, published in 1865, then republished in 1869 by Bologna's radical newspaper, ''Il Popolo'', as a provocation timed to coincide with the 20th Vatican Ecumenical Council, a time when revolutionary fervor directed against the papacy was running high as republicans pressed both politically and militarily for an end of the Vatican’s domination over the papal states.

While "Inno a Satana" had quite a revolutionary impact, Carducci's finest poetry came in later years. His collections ''Rime Nuove'' (''New Rhymes'') and ''Odi Barbare'' (''Barbarian Odes'') contain his greatest works.

He was the first Italian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1906. He was also elected a Senator of Italy. Although his reputation rests primarily on his poetry, he also produced a large body of prose works. Indeed, his prose writings, including literary criticism, biographies, speeches and essays, fill some 20 volumes. Carducci was also an excellent translator and translated some of Goethe and Heine into Italian.

He died in Bologna at the age of 71.

See also

Jessie White Mario

Sources

Nobel Prize Presentation Speech

References

External links

Nobel Prize Biography page

Carducci: all the poems

Giosuè Carducci: 19th century poet, statesman and satanist

Giosuè Carducci poems Original Italian text

Category:1835 births Category:1907 deaths Category:People from Pietrasanta Category:Italian poets Category:Nobel laureates in Literature Category:Italian Nobel laureates Category:University of Pisa alumni

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name	Robert Louis Stevenson
birth name	Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson
birth date	November 13, 1850
birth place	Edinburgh, Scotland
death date	December 03, 1894
death place	Vailima, Samoa
occupation	Novelist, poet, travel writer
nationality	Scottish
period	Victorian era
notableworks	''Treasure Island'', ''A Child's Garden of Verses'', ''Kidnapped'', ''Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde''
spouse	Fanny Vandegrift Osbourne
children	stepson: Lloyd Osbourne
relatives	father: Thomas Stevensonmother: Margaret Isabella Balfour
influences	Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Guy de Maupassant, Nathaniel Hawthorne
influenced	H. Rider Haggard, Jorge Luis Borges, Javier Marías, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Vladimir Nabokov, J. M. Barrie, Michael de Larrabeiti, Arthur Conan Doyle, Diana Gabaldon
website	}}

Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson (13 November 1850 – 3 December 1894) was a Scottish novelist, poet, essayist and travel writer. His best-known books include ''Treasure Island'', ''Kidnapped'', and ''Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde''.

A literary celebrity during his lifetime, Stevenson now ranks among the 30 most translated authors in the world, just below Charles Dickens. He has been greatly admired by many authors, including Jorge Luis Borges, Ernest Hemingway, Rudyard Kipling, Marcel Schwob, Vladimir Nabokov, J. M. Barrie, and G. K. Chesterton, who said of him that he "seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins."

Life

Childhood

Stevenson was born Robert Lewis Balfour Stevenson at 8 Howard Place, Edinburgh, Scotland, on 13 November 1850, to Thomas Stevenson (1818–1887), a leading lighthouse engineer, and his wife, the former Margaret Isabella Balfour (1829–1897). Lighthouse design was the family profession: Thomas's own father (Robert's grandfather) was the famous Robert Stevenson, and his maternal grandfather, Thomas Smith, and brothers Alan and David were also among those in the business. On Margaret's side, the family were gentry, tracing their name back to an Alexander Balfour, who held the lands of Inchrye in Fife in the fifteenth century. Her father, Lewis Balfour (1777–1860), was a minister of the Church of Scotland at nearby Colinton, and Stevenson spent the greater part of his boyhood holidays in his house. "Now I often wonder", says Stevenson, "what I inherited from this old minister. I must suppose, indeed, that he was fond of preaching sermons, and so am I, though I never heard it maintained that either of us loved to hear them."

Both Balfour and his daughter had a "weak chest" and often needed to stay in warmer climates for their health. Stevenson inherited a tendency to coughs and fevers, exacerbated when the family moved to a damp and chilly house at 1 Inverleith Terrace in 1851. The family moved again to the sunnier 17 Heriot Row when Stevenson was six, but the tendency to extreme sickness in winter remained with him until he was eleven. Illness would be a recurrent feature of his adult life and left him extraordinarily thin. Contemporary views were that he had tuberculosis, but more recent views are that it was bronchiectasis or even sarcoidosis.

Stevenson's parents were both devout and serious Presbyterians, but the household was not strict in its adherence to Calvinist principles. His nurse, Alison Cunningham (known as Cummy), was more fervently religious. Her Calvinism and folk beliefs were an early source of nightmares for the child, and he showed a precocious concern for religion. But she also cared for him tenderly in illness, reading to him from Bunyan and the Bible as he lay sick in bed and telling tales of the Covenanters. Stevenson recalled this time of sickness in the poem "The Land of Counterpane" in ''A Child's Garden of Verses'' (1885) and dedicated the book to his nurse. An only child, strange-looking and eccentric, Stevenson found it hard to fit in when he was sent to a nearby school at age six, a problem repeated at age eleven when he went on to the Edinburgh Academy; but he mixed well in lively games with his cousins in summer holidays at the Colinton manse. In any case, his frequent illnesses often kept him away from his first school, and he was taught for long stretches by private tutors. He was a late reader, first learning at age seven or eight, but even before this he dictated stories to his mother and nurse. Throughout his childhood, he was compulsively writing stories. His father was proud of this interest: He had himself written stories in his spare time until his own father found them and told him to "give up such nonsense and mind your business." He paid for the printing of Robert's first publication at sixteen, an account of the covenanters' rebellion published on its two hundredth anniversary, ''The Pentland Rising: a Page of History, 1666'' (1866).

In November 1867 he entered the University of Edinburgh to study engineering. He showed from the start no enthusiasm for his studies and devoted much energy to avoiding lectures. This time was more important for the friendships he made with other students in the Speculative Society (an exclusive debating club), particularly with Charles Baxter, who would become Stevenson's financial agent, and with one professor, Fleeming Jenkin, whose house staged amateur drama in which Stevenson took part, and whose biography he would later write. Perhaps most important at this point in his life was a cousin, Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson (known as "Bob"), a lively and light-hearted young man who instead of the family profession had chosen to study art. Each year during vacations, Stevenson travelled to inspect the family's engineering works—to Anstruther and Wick in 1868, with his father on his official tour of Orkney and Shetland islands lighthouses in 1869, and for three weeks to the island of Erraid in 1870. He enjoyed the travels, but more for the material they gave for his writing than for any engineering interest. The voyage with his father pleased him because a similar journey of Walter Scott with Robert Stevenson had provided the inspiration for ''The Pirate''. In April 1871, he announced to his father his decision to pursue a life of letters. Though the elder Stevenson was naturally disappointed, the surprise cannot have been great, and Stevenson's mother reported that he was "wonderfully resigned" to his son's choice. To provide some security, it was agreed that Stevenson should read law (again at Edinburgh University) and be called to the Scottish bar. Years later, in his poetry collection ''Underwoods'' (1887), he looked back on how he turned away from the family profession:

Say not of me that weakly I declined The labours of my sires, and fled the sea, The towers we founded and the lamps we lit, But rather say: In the afternoon of time A strenuous family dusted from its hands The sand of granite, and beholding far Along the sounding coast its pyramids And tall memorials catch the dying sun, Smiled well content, and to this childish task Around the fire addressed its evening hours.

In other respects too, Stevenson was moving away from his upbringing. His dress became more Bohemian: He already wore his hair long, but he now took to wearing a velveteen jacket and rarely attended parties in conventional evening dress. Within the limits of a strict allowance, he visited cheap pubs and brothels. More importantly, he had come to reject Christianity. In January 1873, his father came across the constitution of the LJR (Liberty, Justice, Reverence) club, of which Stevenson with his cousin Bob was a member, which began: "Disregard everything our parents have taught us." Questioning his son about his beliefs, he discovered the truth, leading to a long period of dissension with both parents:

What a ''damned'' curse I am to my parents! As my father said "You have rendered my whole life a failure". As my mother said "This is the heaviest affliction that has ever befallen me". O Lord, what a pleasant thing it is to have damned the happiness of (probably) the only two people who care a damn about you in the world.

Early writing and travels

In late 1873, on a visit to a cousin in England, Stevenson made friends with two people who were to be of great importance to him, Sidney Colvin and Fanny (Frances Jane) Sitwell. Sitwell was a woman of thirty four with a young son who was separated from her husband. She attracted the devotion of many who met her, including Colvin, who eventually married her in 1901. Stevenson was another of those drawn to her, and over several years they kept up a heated correspondence in which Stevenson wavered between the role of a suitor and a son (he came to address her as "Madonna"). Colvin became Stevenson's literary adviser and after his death was the first editor of his letters. Soon after their first meeting, he had placed Stevenson's first paid contribution, an essay entitled "Roads," in ''The Portfolio''. Stevenson was soon active in London literary life, becoming acquainted with many of the writers of the time, including Andrew Lang, Edmund Gosse, and Leslie Stephen, the editor of the ''Cornhill Magazine'', who took an interest in Stevenson's work. Stephen in turn would introduce him to a more important friend. Visiting Edinburgh in 1875, he took Stevenson with him to visit a patient at the Edinburgh Infirmary, William Henley. Henley, an energetic and talkative man with a wooden leg, became a close friend and occasional literary collaborator for many years until in 1888 a quarrel broke up the friendship. He is often seen as providing a partial model for the character of Long John Silver in ''Treasure Island''.

In November 1873, Stevenson had a physical collapse and was sent for his health to Menton on the French Riviera. He returned in better health in April 1874 and settled down to his studies, but he would often return to France in the coming years. He made long and frequent trips to the neighbourhood of the Forest of Fontainebleau, staying at Barbizon, Grez-sur-Loing, and Nemours and becoming a member of the artists' colonies there, as well as to Paris to visit galleries and the theatres. He did qualify for the Scottish bar in July 1875, and his father added a brass plate with "R.L. Stevenson, Advocate" to the Heriot Row house. But although his law studies would influence his books, he never practised law. All his energies were now spent in travel and writing. One of his journeys, a canoe voyage in Belgium and France with Sir Walter Simpson, a friend from the Speculative Society and frequent travel companion, was the basis of his first real book, ''An Inland Voyage'' (1878).

Marriage

The canoe voyage with Simpson brought Stevenson to Grez in September 1876, and here he first met Fanny Vandegrift Osbourne (1840–1914). Born in Indianapolis, she had married at the age of seventeen and soon moved with her husband, Samuel Osbourne, to California. She had three children by the marriage, Isobel (or "Belle"), the eldest, Lloyd, and Hervey (who died in 1875), but anger over infidelities by her husband led to a number of separations and in 1875 she had taken her children to France, where she and Isobel studied art. Although Stevenson returned to Britain shortly after this first meeting, Fanny apparently remained in his thoughts, and he wrote an essay, "On falling in love," for the ''Cornhill Magazine''. They met again early in 1877 and became lovers. Stevenson spent much of the following years with her and her children in France. Then, in August 1878, Fanny returned to her home in San Francisco, California. Stevenson at first remained in Europe, making the walking trip that would form the basis for ''Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes'' (1879). But in August 1879, he set off to join her, against the advice of his friends and without notifying his parents. He took second-class passage on the steamship ''Devonia'', in part to save money but also to learn how others travelled and to increase the adventure of the journey. From New York City he travelled overland by train to California. He later wrote about the experience in ''The Amateur Emigrant''. Although it was good experience for his literature, it broke his health, and he was near death when he arrived in Monterey. He was nursed back to health by some ranchers there.

By December 1879 he had recovered his health enough to continue to San Francisco, where for several months he struggled "all alone on forty-five cents a day, and sometimes less, with quantities of hard work and many heavy thoughts," in an effort to support himself through his writing, but by the end of the winter his health was broken again and he found himself at death's door. Vandegrift, now divorced and recovered from her own illness, came to Stevenson's bedside and nursed him to recovery. "After a while," he wrote, "my spirit got up again in a divine frenzy, and has since kicked and spurred my vile body forward with great emphasis and success." When his father heard of his condition, he cabled him money to help him through this period.

In May 1880, Stevenson married Fanny, although, as he said, he was "a mere complication of cough and bones, much fitter for an emblem of mortality than a bridegroom." With his new wife and her son, Lloyd, he travelled north of San Francisco to Napa Valley, and spent a summer honeymoon at an abandoned mining camp on Mount Saint Helena. He wrote about this experience in ''The Silverado Squatters''. He met Charles Warren Stoddard, co-editor of the ''Overland Monthly'' and author of ''South Sea Idylls,'' who urged Stevenson to travel to the south Pacific, an idea which would return to him many years later. In August 1880 he sailed with his family from New York back to Britain and found his parents and his friend Sidney Colvin on the wharf at Liverpool, happy to see him return home. Gradually, his new wife was able to patch up differences between father and son and make herself a part of the new family through her charm and wit.

Attempted settlement in Europe and the U.S.

For the next seven years, between 1880 and 1887, Stevenson searched in vain for a place of residence suitable to his state of health. He spent his summers at various places in Scotland and England, including Westbourne, Dorset, a residential area in Bournemouth. There he lived in a dwelling he renamed Skerryvore after a lighthouse, the tallest in Scotland, built by his uncle Alan Stevenson many years earlier. For his winters, he escaped to sunny France and lived at Davos-Platz and the Chalet de Solitude at Hyères, where, for a time, he enjoyed almost complete happiness. "I have so many things to make life sweet for me," he wrote, "it seems a pity I cannot have that other one thing—health. But though you will be angry to hear it, I believe, for myself at least, what is is best. I believed it all through my worst days, and I am not ashamed to profess it now." In spite of his ill health, he produced the bulk of his best-known work during these years: ''Treasure Island'', his first widely popular book; ''Kidnapped''; ''Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde'', the story which established his wider reputation; ''The Black Arrow''; and two volumes of verse, ''A Child's Garden of Verses'' and ''Underwoods''. At Skerryvore he gave a copy of ''Kidnapped'' to his dear friend and frequent visitor Henry James.

On the death of his father in 1887, Stevenson felt free to follow the advice of his physician to try a complete change of climate, and he started with his mother and family for Colorado. But after landing in New York, they decided to spend the winter at Saranac Lake, in the Adirondacks at a cure cottage now known as Stevenson Cottage. During the intensely cold winter Stevenson wrote a number of his best essays, including ''Pulvis et Umbra'', began ''The Master of Ballantrae'', and lightheartedly planned, for the following summer, a cruise to the southern Pacific Ocean. "The proudest moments of my life," he wrote, "have been passed in the stern-sheets of a boat with that romantic garment over my shoulders."

Politics

Much like his father, Stevenson remained a staunch Tory for most of his life. His cousin and biographer, Sir Graham Balfour, said that "he probably throughout life would, if compelled to vote, have always supported the Conservative candidate." During his college years, he briefly identified himself as a "red-hot Socialist." However, by the year 1877, at only twenty-seven years of age and before having written most of his major fictional works, Stevenson reflected: "For my part, I look back to the time when I was a Socialist with something like regret. I have convinced myself (for the moment) that we had better leave these great changes to what we call great blind forces: their blindness being so much more perspicacious than the little, peering, partial eyesight of men [...] Now I know that in thus turning Conservative with years, I am going through the normal cycle of change and travelling in the common orbit of men's opinions. I submit to this, as I would submit to gout or gray hair, as a concomitant of growing age or else of failing animal heat; but I do not acknowledge that it is necessarily a change for the better—I dare say it is deplorably for the worse."

Journey to the Pacific

In June 1888, Stevenson chartered the yacht ''Casco'' and set sail with his family from San Francisco. The vessel "plowed her path of snow across the empty deep, far from all track of commerce, far from any hand of help." The salt sea air and thrill of adventure for a time restored his health; and for nearly three years he wandered the eastern and central Pacific, stopping for extended stays at the Hawaiian Islands, where he became a good friend of King Kal�?kaua, with whom Stevenson spent much time. Furthermore, Stevenson befriended the king's niece, Princess Victoria Kaiulani, who was of Scottish heritage. He also spent time at the Gilbert Islands, Tahiti, New Zealand and the Samoan Islands. During this period he completed ''The Master of Ballantrae'', composed two ballads based on the legends of the islanders, and wrote ''The Bottle Imp''. He also witnessed the Samoan crisis. The experience of these years is preserved in his various letters and in ''In the South Seas'', which is an account of the 1888 cruise of Stevenson and Fanny Vandegrift Stevenson on the yacht ''Casco'' from the Hawaiian Islands to the Marquesas and Tuamotu islands. A second voyage on the trading schooner ''Equator'' followed in 1889, with Lloyd Osbourne accompanying them, with the schooner visiting Butaritari, Mariki, Apaiang and Abemama in the Gilbert Islands, (also known as the Kingsmills) now Kiribati. During the voyage on the ''Equator'' Stevenson and Vandegrift Stevenson spent several months on Abemama with the tyrant-chief Tem Binoka, of Abemama, Aranuka and Kuria, who was immortalized by Stevenson in ''In the South Seas''.

It was also from this period that one particular open letter stands as testimony to his activism and indignation at the pettiness of such "powers that be" as a Presbyterian minister in Honolulu named Rev. Dr. Hyde. During his time in the Hawaiian Islands, Stevenson had visited Molokai and the leper colony there, shortly after the demise of Father Damien. When Dr. Hyde wrote a letter to a fellow clergyman speaking ill of Father Damien, Stevenson wrote a scathing open letter of rebuke to Dr. Hyde. Soon afterwards, in April 1890, Stevenson left Sydney on the ''Janet Nicoll'' and went on his third and final voyage among the South Seas islands.

While Stevenson intended to write another book of travel writing to follow his earlier book ''In the South Seas'', it was his wife who eventually published her journal of their third voyage. (Fanny misnames the ship as the ''Janet Nicol'' in her account of the 1890 voyage, ''The Cruise of the Janet Nichol''.) A fellow passenger was Jack Buckland, whose stories of life as an island trader became the inspiration for the character of Tommy Hadden in ''The Wrecker'' (1892), which Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne wrote together. Buckland later visited Robert and Fanny Stevenson at Vailima in 1894.

Last years

In 1890, Stevenson purchased four hundred acres (about 1.6 square kilometres) of land in Upolu, one of the Samoan islands. Here, after two aborted attempts to visit Scotland, he established himself, after much work, upon his estate in the village of Vailima. Stevenson himself adopted the native name Tusitala (Samoan for "Teller of Tales", i.e. a storyteller). His influence spread to the Samoans, who consulted him for advice, and he soon became involved in local politics. He was convinced the European officials appointed to rule the Samoans were incompetent, and after many futile attempts to resolve the matter, he published ''A Footnote to History''. This was such a stinging protest against existing conditions that it resulted in the recall of two officials, and Stevenson feared for a time it would result in his own deportation. When things had finally blown over he wrote to Colvin, who came from a family of distinguished colonial administrators, "I used to think meanly of the plumber; but how he shines beside the politician!"

He was friends with some of the politicians and their families. At one point he formally donated, by deed of gift, his birthday to the daughter of the American Land Commissioner Henry Clay Ide, since she was born on Christmas Day and had no birthday celebration separate from the family's Christmas celebrations. This led to a strong bond between the Stevenson and Ide families.

In addition to building his house and clearing his land and helping the Samoans in many ways, he found time to work at his writing. He felt that "there was never any man had so many irons in the fire." He wrote ''The Beach of Falesa'', ''Catriona'' (titled ''David Balfour'' in the USA), ''The Ebb-Tide'', and the ''Vailima Letters'', during this period.

For a time during 1894 Stevenson felt depressed; he wondered if he had exhausted his creative vein and completely worked himself out. He wrote that he had "overworked bitterly". He felt more clearly that, with each fresh attempt, the best he could write was "ditch-water". He even feared that he might again become a helpless invalid. He rebelled against this idea: "I wish to die in my boots; no more Land of Counterpane for me. To be drowned, to be shot, to be thrown from a horse — ay, to be hanged, rather than pass again through that slow dissolution." He then suddenly had a return of his old energy and he began work on ''Weir of Hermiston''. "It's so good that it frightens me," he is reported to have exclaimed. He felt that this was the best work he had done. He was convinced, "sick and well, I have had splendid life of it, grudge nothing, regret very little ... take it all over, damnation and all, would hardly change with any man of my time."

Without knowing it, he was to have his wish fulfilled. During the morning of 3 December 1894, he had worked hard as usual on ''Weir of Hermiston''. During the evening, while conversing with his wife and straining to open a bottle of wine, he suddenly exclaimed, "What's that!" He then asked his wife, "Does my face look strange?" and collapsed beside her. He died within a few hours, probably of a cerebral haemorrhage, at the age of 44. The Samoans insisted on surrounding his body with a watch-guard during the night and on bearing their Tusitala upon their shoulders to nearby Mount Vaea, where they buried him on a spot overlooking the sea. Stevenson had always wanted his 'Requiem' inscribed on his tomb.

::''Under the wide and starry sky,'' ::''Dig the grave and let me lie.'' ::''Glad did I live and gladly die,'' ::''And I laid me down with a will.'' ::''This be the verse you grave for me:'' ::''Here he lies where he longed to be;'' ::''Home is the sailor, home from sea,'' ::''And the hunter home from the hill.'' However, the piece is widely misquoted, including the inscription on his tomb, which closes: ::''Home is the sailor, home from the sea,'' ::''And the hunter home from the hill.''

Stevenson was loved by the Samoans and the engraving on his tombstone was translated to a Samoan song of grief which is well known and still sung in Samoa.

Monuments and commemoration

A bronze relief memorial to Stevenson, designed by American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens in 1904, is mounted in the Moray Aisle of St Giles' Cathedral, Edinburgh. Another memorial in Edinburgh stands in West Princes Street Gardens below Edinburgh Castle; it is a simple upright stone inscribed with "RLS - A Man of Letters 1850 -1894" by sculptor Iain Hamilton Finlay in 1987.

There is a plaque above the door of a house in Castleton of Braemar that asserts 'Here R.L.Stevenson spent the Summer of 1881 and wrote Treasure Island, his first great work'.

A garden was designed by the Bournemouth Corporation in 1957 as a memorial to Stevenson, on the site of his Westbourne house "Skerryvore" which he lived in from 1885 to 1887. A statue of the Skerryvore lighthouse is present on the site.

In 1994, to mark the 100th Anniversary of Stevenson's death, the Royal Bank of Scotland issued a series of commemorative £1 notes which featured a quill pen and Stevenson's signature on the obverse, and Stevenson's face on the reverse side. Alongside Stevenson's portrait are scenes from some of his books and his house in Western Samoa where he died in 1894. Two million notes were issued, each with a serial number beginning "RLS". The first note to be printed was sent to Samoa in time for their centenary celebrations on 3 December 1994.

Modern reception

Stevenson was a celebrity in his own time, but with the rise of modern literature after World War I, he was seen for much of the 20th century as a writer of the second class, relegated to children's literature and horror genres. Condemned by literary figures such as Virginia Woolf (daughter of his early mentor Leslie Stephen) and her husband Leonard, he was gradually excluded from the canon of literature taught in schools. His exclusion reached a height when in the 1973 2,000-page ''Oxford Anthology of English Literature'' Stevenson was entirely unmentioned; and ''The Norton Anthology of English Literature'' excluded him from 1968 to 2000 (1st–7th editions), including him only in the 8th edition (2006). The late 20th century saw the start of a re-evaluation of Stevenson as an artist of great range and insight, a literary theorist, an essayist and social critic, a witness to the colonial history of the Pacific Islands, and a humanist. Even as early as 1965 the pendulum had begun to swing: he was praised by Roger Lancelyn Green, one of the Oxford Inklings, as a writer of a consistently high level of "literary skill or sheer imaginative power" and a co-originator with H. Rider Haggard of the Age of the Story Tellers. He is now being re-evaluated as a peer of authors such as Joseph Conrad (whom Stevenson influenced with his South Seas fiction) and Henry James, with new scholarly studies and organisations devoted to Stevenson. No matter what the scholarly reception, Stevenson remains very popular around the world. According to the Index Translationum, Stevenson is ranked the 26th most translated author in the world, ahead of fellow nineteenth-century writers Oscar Wilde and Edgar Allan Poe.

Gallery

Bibliography

Novels

''The Hair Trunk or The Ideal Commonwealth'' (1877) Unfinished and unpublished.

''Treasure Island'' (1883) His first major success, a tale of piracy, buried treasure, and adventure, has been filmed frequently. In an 1881 letter to W. E. Henley, he provided the earliest known title, "The Sea Cook, or Treasure Island: a Story for Boys".

''The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses'' (1888) An historical adventure novel and romance set during the Wars of the Roses.

''Prince Otto'' (1885) Stevenson’s third full-length narrative, an action romance set in the imaginary Germanic state of Grünewald.

''Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde'' (1886), a novella about a dual personality much depicted in plays and films, also influential in the growth of understanding of the subconscious mind through its treatment of a kind and intelligent physician who turns into a psychopathic monster after imbibing a drug intended to separate good from evil in a personality.

''Kidnapped'' (1886) is a historical novel that tells of the boy David Balfour's pursuit of his inheritance and his alliance with Alan Breck in the intrigues of Jacobite troubles in Scotland.

''The Master of Ballantrae'' (1889), a masterful tale of revenge, set in Scotland, America, and India.

''The Wrong Box'' (1889); co-written with Lloyd Osbourne. A comic novel of a tontine, also filmed (1966).

''The Wrecker'' (1892); co-written with Lloyd Osbourne.

''Catriona'' (1893), also known as ''David Balfour,'' is a sequel to ''Kidnapped'', telling of Balfour's further adventures.

''The Ebb-Tide'' (1894); co-written with Lloyd Osbourne.

''Weir of Hermiston'' (1896). Unfinished at the time of Stevenson's death, considered to have promised great artistic growth.

''St. Ives: being the Adventures of a French Prisoner in England'' (1897). Unfinished at the time of Stevenson's death, the novel was completed by Arthur Quiller-Couch.

Short story collections

''New Arabian Nights'' (1882)

''More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter'' (1885); co-written with Fanny Van De Grift Stevenson

''The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables'' (1887)

''Island Nights' Entertainments'' (also known as ''South Sea Tales'') (1893)

''Fables'' (1896)

Short stories

List of short stories sorted chronologically. Note: does not include collaborations with Fanny found in ''More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter''.

!Title	!Date	!Collection	!Notes
"A Lodging for the Night"	1877	''New Arabian Nights''	Stevenson's first published fiction when he was 27 years old.
"The Sire De Malétroits Door"	1877	''New Arabian Nights''
"An Old Song"	1877	Uncollected
"Edifying Letters of the Rutherford Family"	1877	Uncollected
"Later-day Arabian Nights"	1878	''New Arabian Nights''
"Providence and the Guitar"	1878	''New Arabian Nights''
"The Pavilion on the Links"	1880	''New Arabian Nights''	Told in 9 mini-chapters. Conan Doyle in 1890 called it the first English short story.
"The Story of a Lie"	1882	Uncollected
	1882	''The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables''
"The Body Snatcher"	1884	Uncollected	First published in the Christmas 1884 edition of the ''Pall Mall Gazette''.
"Markheim"	1885	''The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables''
''Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde''	1886	Uncollected	Variably referred to as a short story or novella, or more rarely, a short novel.
"Will O' the Mill"	1887	''The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables''
"Thrawn Janet"	1887	''The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables''
	1887	''The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables''
"The Treasure of Franchard"	1887	''The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables''
"The Misadventures of John Nicholson: A Christmas Story"	1887	Uncollected
"The Bottle Imp"	1891	''Island Nights' Entertainments''
"The Beach of Falesá"	1892	''Island Nights' Entertainments''	First published in ''The Illustrated London News'' in 1892
"The Isle of Voices"	1893	''Island Nights' Entertainments''

Other works

"Béranger, Pierre Jean de", article for the ninth edition of the ''Encyclopædia Britannica'' (1875–89)

''Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes'' (1879)

''Virginibus Puerisque, and Other Papers'' (1881), essays including "An Apology for Idlers"

''Familiar Studies of Men and Books'' (1882)

''Memories and Portraits'' (1887), a collection of essays.

''Aes Triplex'' (1887)

''Father Damien: an Open Letter to the Rev. Dr. Hyde of Honolulu'' (1890)

''Vailima Letters'' (1895)

''The New Lighthouse on the Dhu Heartach Rock, Argyllshire'' (1995). Based on an 1872 manuscript edited by R. G. Swearingen. California. Silverado Museum.

''Sophia Scarlet'' (2008). Based on 1892 manuscript edited by Robert Hoskins. AUT Media (AUT University).

Poetry

''A Child's Garden of Verses'' (1885), written for children but also popular with their parents. Includes such favourites as "My Shadow" and "The Lamplighter". Often thought to represent a positive reflection of the author's sickly childhood.

''Underwoods'' (1887), a collection of poetry written in both English and Scots.

''Ticonderoga: A Legend of the West Highlands'' (1887). Based on a famous Scottish ghost story.

''Ballads'' (1891)

''Songs of Travel and Other Verses'' (1896)

Travel writing

''An Inland Voyage'' (1878), travels with a friend in a "Rob Roy" canoe from Antwerp (Belgium) to Pontoise, just north of Paris.

''Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes'' (1879), two weeks' solo ramble (with Modestine as his beast of burden) in the mountains of Cévennes (south-central France), one of the first books to present hiking and camping as recreational activities. It tells of commissioning one of the first sleeping bags.

''The Silverado Squatters'' (1883). An unconventional honeymoon trip to an abandoned mining camp in Napa Valley with his new wife Fanny and her son Lloyd. He presciently identifies the California wine industry as one to be reckoned with.

''Across the Plains'' (written in 1879–80, published in 1892). Second leg of his journey, by train from New York to California (then picks up with ''The Silverado Squatters''). Also includes other travel essays.

''The Amateur Emigrant'' (written 1879–80, published 1895). An account of the first leg of his journey to California, by ship from Europe to New York. Andrew Noble (''From the Clyde to California: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Emigrant Journey'', 1985) considers it to be his finest work.

''The Old and New Pacific Capitals'' (1882). An account of his stay in Monterey, California in August to December 1879. Never published separately. See, for example, James D. Hart, ed., ''From Scotland to Silverado'', 1966.

''Essays of Travel'' (London: Chatto & Windus, 1905)

Island literature

Although not well known, his island fiction and non-fiction is among the most valuable and collected of the 19th century body of work that addresses the Pacific area.

Non-fiction works on the Pacific

''In the South Seas'' (1896). A collection of Stevenson's articles and essays on his travels in the Pacific.

''A Footnote to History, Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa'' (1892).

Musical compositions

Stevenson was an amateur composer who wrote songs typical of California in the 1880s, salon-type music, entertaining rather than serious. A flageolet player, Stevenson had studied harmony and simple counterpoint and knew such basic instrumental techniques as transposition. Some song titles include "Fanfare", "Tune for Flageolet", "Habanera", and "Quadrille". Robert Hughes in 1968 arranged a number of Stevenson's songs for chamber orchestra, which went on a tour of the Pacific Northwest in that year.

See also

Robert Louis Stevenson State Park

Victorian literature

References

Secondary literature

Graham Balfour, ''The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson'', London: Methuen, 1901.

John Jay Chapman "Robert Louis Stevenson", Emerson, and Other Essays''. New York: AMS Press, 1969, ISBN 0404006191 (reprinted from the edition of 1899)

David Daiches, "Robert Louis Stevenson and his World", London: Thames and Hudson, 1973, ISBN 0500130450

J. C. Furnas, ''Voyage to Windward: The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson'', London: Faber and Faber, 1952

Claire Harman, ''Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography'', HarperCollins, ISBN 0-00-711321-8 [reviewed by Matthew Sturgis in ''The Times Literary Supplement'', 11 March 2005, page 8]

James Pope-Hennessy, ''Robert Louis Stevenson - A Biography'', London: Cape, 1974, ISBN 0224010077

Rosaline Masson, ''Robert Louis Stevenson''. London: The People's Books, 1912.

Rosaline Masson, ''The life of Robert Louis Stevenson''. Edinburgh & London: W. & R. Chambers, 1923.

Rosaline Masson (editor), ''I can remember Robert Louis Stevenson''. Edinburgh & London: W. & R. Chambers, 1923.

Ernest Mehew, "Robert Louis Stevenson", ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'', Oxford: OUP, 2004. Retrieved on 29 September 2008

Roland Paxton, "Stevenson, Thomas (1818-1887)", ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'', Oxford: OUP, 2004. Retrieved on 11 October 2008

Eve Blantyre Simpson, ''Robert Louis Stevenson's Edinburgh Days'', London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1898.

Eve Blantyre Simpson, ''The Robert Louis Stevenson Originals'', [With illustrations and facsimiles], London& Edinburgh: T.N. Foulis, 1912.

External links

Works

Works by or about Robert Louis Stevenson at Internet Archive and Google Books (scanned books original editions color illustrated)

(plain text and HTML)

Works by Robert Louis Stevenson, at the Online Books Page (plain text and HTML)

Essays by Stevenson at Quotidiana.org

151 poems by Robert Louis Stevenson, at Poetry Archive

"Henry David Thoreau: His Character and Opinions", by Robert Louis Stevenson

''Fables'', by Robert Louis Stevenson, at The University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center.

Works by Robert Louis Stevenson in PDF at Ria Press.

Stevenson's writings in Scots at ScotsteXt

Steven's Library, database of books in RLS's library.

About

There are over 200 published biographies of RLS

''Robert Louis Stevenson: a record, an estimate, and a memorial'', by Alexander H. Japp

''Robert Louis Stevenson'', a biography by Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh

Robert Louis Stevenson: a memoir (1895), by Edmund Gosse who knew Stevenson personally.

The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson (1913) by Graham Balfour, Stevenson's cousin.

Robert Louis Stevenson: biography (1911), by Edmund Gosse, from the ''Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition''

Robert Louis Stevenson, biography from the ''Dictionary of Literary Biography'', 1987.

The bell rock lighthouse and the Stevensons: the history of an old sea tower and a family of engineers

Websites

The Robert Louis Stevenson Website at Edinburgh Napier University

''Journal of Stevenson Studies''

Robert Louis Stevenson trail GR70

Silverado Museum, California, devoted to Robert Louis Stevenson

Category:Alumni of the University of Edinburgh Category:British non-fiction outdoors writers Category:Deaths from cerebral hemorrhage Category:Edinburgh Academicals Category:Lallans poets Category:People from Edinburgh Category:People illustrated on sterling banknotes Category:Scottish children's writers Category:Scottish historical novelists Category:Scottish horror writers Category:Scottish novelists Category:Scottish poets Category:Scottish Presbyterians Category:Scottish short story writers Category:Scottish travel writers Category:1850 births Category:1894 deaths Category:19th-century Scottish people Category:Samoan writers Category:Fabulists

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B.W. Stevenson (5 October 1949 - 28 April 1988), born Louis Charles Stevenson, was an American country pop artist, working in a genre now called progressive country. "B.W." stood for "Buckwheat." Stevenson is most famous for his song "My Maria", co-written with Daniel Moore.

He was born in Dallas, Texas and attended W.H. Adamson High School with such other future noted musicians as Michael Martin Murphey, Ray Wylie Hubbard, and Larry Groce.

As recorded by Stevenson, "My Maria" became a hit, reaching #9 on ''Billboard'''s Hot 100 for the week ending September 29, 1973. The tune was covered much later by the country duo Brooks & Dunn, for whom it was a three-week #1 country hit in mid 1996. Stevenson had several other successful chart singles, including "A Little Bit of Understanding" and the original version of Daniel Moore's "Shambala", which in a cover version by Three Dog Night reached #3. However, Stevenson never again regained the success he had with the release of "My Maria". Stevenson recorded one Contemporary Christian album "Lifeline" produced by Chris Christian that had success on Christian radio with the hit "Headed Home". During the time he recorded "Lifeline", he lived next door to Chris Christian in Beverly Hills, California.

Author Jan Reid devotes a chapter to Stevenson in his book ''The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock'', dubbing him "The Voice".

Stevenson died undergoing heart valve surgery at the age of 38. Since his death, Poor David's Pub in Dallas has held an annual songwriting competition in his memory.

Discography

1972 ''B.W. Stevenson'' (RCA)

1972 ''Lead Free'' (RCA)

1973 ''My Maria'' (RCA)

1973 ''Calabasas'' (RCA)

1975 ''We Be Sailin''' (Warner Bros)

1977 ''The Best of B.W. Stevenson'' (RCA)

1977 ''Lost Feeling'' (Warner Bros)

1980 ''Lifeline'' (Home Sweet Home Records)

1990 ''Rainbow Down the Road'' (Amazing Records)

2000 ''Very Best of B.W. Stevenson'' (Collectables)

2003 ''Lead Free/B. W. Stevenson'' (Collectables)

2003 ''My Maria/Calabasas'' (Collectables)

2005 ''We Be Sailin'/Lost Feeling'' (Collectables)

Collaborators

Larry Carlton: guitar

Layton DePenning: guitar

Jim Gordon: drums

Al DeBoe: drums

Donny Dolan: drums

Joe Osborn: bass

Rod Garrison: bass

Lorna Willard: backing vocals

Venata Field: backing vocals

Chris Christian: guitar, keyboards, backing vocals

References

External links

CMT profile

Oldies.com bio

Bio of B.W. Stevenson including cause of death

B. W. Stevenson at Find A Grave

Category:1949 births Category:1988 deaths Category:People from Dallas, Texas Category:Musicians from Texas Category:American male singers