Thoreau and the American Idyll

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the 19th century American writer and philosopher, Henry David Thoreau. Anti-slavery activist and passionate environmentalist, Thoreau was above all a champion of self-reliance and individualism. He was also a champion of the simple life, a lover of nature and an enemy of the modern who lived alone in a log cabin in the woods away from society. In his seminal work, Walden, published in 1854, he wrote: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.” Thoreau has become emblematic of one version of American values and his work has been an inspiration to politicians and writers alike, from Martin Luther King to Gandhi, Yeats and Tolstoy. Yet in many ways Thoreau remains a mystery, a man of contradictions who advocated self-sufficiency but was happy to let his mother do his washing and cook his meals.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Kathleen Burk 11 episodes
  Professor of American History at University College London
• Tim Morris No other episodes
  Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Dundee
• Stephen Fender No other episodes
  Honorary Professor in English Literature at University College London

Related episodes

• The Philosophy of Solitude
  
  19 Jun, 2014 120 Epistemology
• Walt Whitman
  
  27 Apr, 2023 810 American literature in English
• Nature
  
  10 Jul, 2003 100 Philosophy
• Montaigne
  
  25 Apr, 2013 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism
• Auden
  
  19 Dec, 2019 820 English and Old English literatures
• Hobbes
  
  1 Dec, 2005 320 Political science
• William Hazlitt
  
  8 Apr, 2010 820 English and Old English literatures
• Schopenhauer
  
  29 Oct, 2009 190 Modern Western Philosophy
• Kierkegaard
  
  20 Mar, 2008 190 Modern Western Philosophy
• William Morris
  
  5 Jul, 2018 700 Arts
• Walter Benjamin
  
  10 Feb, 2022 190 Modern Western Philosophy
• Sartre
  
  7 Oct, 2004 840 French and related literatures
• Edmund Burke
  
  3 Jun, 2010 320 Political science
• Spinoza
  
  3 May, 2007 190 Modern Western Philosophy
• Thomas Paine’s Common Sense
  
  21 Jan, 2016 970 History of North America
• David Hume
  
  6 Oct, 2011 100 Philosophy
• Mill
  
  18 May, 2006 320 Political science
• Hegel’s Philosophy of History
  
  26 May, 2022 900 History
• Pragmatism
  
  17 Nov, 2005 190 Modern Western Philosophy
• Wittgenstein
  
  4 Dec, 2003 190 Modern Western Philosophy

---

Programme ID: b00glr78

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00glr78

Auto-category: 810.9 (American literature in English)