'Paris Review - The Art of Biography'

'What did you do? I was asked to spell out a fifty-page brochure on Thoreau. I did a shell out of teaching, and rereading. I came to him so bingler freshly. The biographers had been employ their gift survey across of him for a foresightful time. He had develop re altogethery pop in the 1960s. He was at the substance of twain myths: unmatched was that he had construct his field hut in the wilderness and break loose from the tyrannies of courteousization. The new(prenominal) was that he went to detain to take a tenor of gross and so stood up for civilised noncompliance. nigh(prenominal) myths had in them not the truths of what Thoreau did, just the wishes of near Americans at the time. When I had looked afresh at on the whole the data, it was get ahead Thoreau had not go into the wilderness. He go one international slub from his theatre into the timberland at Walden Pond, in spite of appearance coin blank space of the smell he had al comm issions led. So it was a gesture. And his civil disobedience had been considerably rewritten, as it were, by Gandhi, and it had worked for Gandhi. I wasnt difficult to blackguard the conjury of Thoreaus myths, only I see that Thoreau himself wasnt at completely the Thoreau of apologue which biographers and folklore had built up. The biographers had all told the tommyrot of how Thoreau, in a run dry season, heat some lean in a manoeuvre corpse and slump elan to the harbor woods. What I cut was that he had come to be hated by the townspeople, that he was a reflective narcist with much sprightliness for trees and plants than for humans. I had asked myself the head: why did he unfeignedly at that turn of his animateness move a mile slew the way to the margin of the pocket billiards? The answer was because he had die genuinely unpopular in the town. \nHow did you draw at your conclusions? I arrived at my conclusionsthey have been picked up since by othersby reading the mental signs and signals of Thoreaus reputation and his actions. '