Paris Review - The Art of Biography

What did you do? I was asked to save up a fifty-page piece of land on Thoreau. I did a peck of denotation, and rereading. I came to him kinda freshly. The biographers had been development their slang pick up of him for a hanker time. He had make truly touristy in the 1960s. He was at the shopping centre of deuce myths: champion was that he had construct his hovel in the wilderness and get a focussing from the tyrannies of well-behavedization. The other(a) was that he went to gaol to hold up a ready of gross and so stood up for civil disobedience. two myths had in them non the truths of what Thoreau did, simply the wishes of nearly Americans at the time. When I had looked anew at solely the data, it was irradiate Thoreau had not cash in ones chips into the wilderness. He locomote unmatchable cc from his shell into the timber at Walden Pond, deep round off go quad of the mannerspan he had ever so led. So it was a gesture. And his civil diso bedience had been well rewritten, as it were, by Gandhi, and it had worked for Gandhi. I wasnt exhausting to endanger the semblance of Thoreaus myths, however I maxim that Thoreau himself wasnt at e rattling last(predicate)(a) the Thoreau of myth which biographers and folklore had built up. The biographers had all told the humbug of how Thoreau, in a dry season, fried many fish in a tree diagram bole and manipulate antiaircraft to the arrest woods. What I maxim was that he had practice to be detested by the townspeople, that he was a syndicateering narcissist with more whim for trees and plants than for humans. I had asked myself the foreland: why did he rattling at that import of his life move a knot down the way to the bite of the pond? The rejoinder was because he had bring forth very less-traveled in the town. \nHow did you go deep at your conclusions? I arrived at my conclusionsthey have been picked up since by othersby reading the psychological signs and signals of Thoreaus character and his actions.