| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Natural Life: Thoreau's Worldly Transcendentalism. By David M. Robinson. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004. xvi, 234 pp. $24.95, ISBN 0-8014-4313-X.)

David M. Robinson, a senior scholar of American Transcendentalism whose previous work has focused principally on Ralph Waldo Emerson, has written a comprehensive and original description of Henry David Thoreau's life and writings. At the center of Robinson's account in Natural Life is the death of Thoreau's brother, John Thoreau. As a result of John's death from a tetanus infection in 1842, Thoreau not only lost a brother and his best friend (and Thoreau had few close friends), he also lost a vocation. After attempting and rejecting traditional teaching, Thoreau had worked with his brother at their own innovative and successful school until John's failing health forced them to close their doors in 1841. Robinson convincingly establishes this as the beginning of Thoreau's "crisis of vocation" (p. 2). His eventual removal in 1845 to Walden Pond marked Thoreau's turn to the vocation of the "natural life," the need for which he poetically pronounces at the conclusion to his first volume, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849): "'Men nowhere, east or west, live yet a natural life, round which the vine clings, and which the elm willingly shadows'" (quoted in Natural Life, 75).

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