Abstract

The world economic is developing rapidly and material civilization is improving day by day. Thoreau’s value that expressed in Walden“simplify”、“back to the nature”and so on like a wisp of spring breeze,bringing spring to our life. The writer will analyze Walden and find out the useful views for the modern people.
Key words：value, Walden, simplify，nature

1.Introduction

  Henry.David.Thoreau was born in Concord,Massachusetts on July 12,1817, the third child of John Thoreau and Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau . He became a famous American nature writer and preservation thinker of the 19th century. The freethinking Thoreau were relatively cultured, but they were also poor, making their living by the modest production of homemade pencils. Despite financial constraints, Henry received a top-notch education, first at Concord Academy and then at Harvard College in nearby Cambridge,Massachusetts. His education there included ancient and modern European languages and literatures, philosophy,theology, and history. These education made a foundation for Thoreau to become a writer ,a philosopher and a naturalist. He was a keen observer of nature. By dwelling in nature for a long time, he discovered the kinship existing between nature and human beings. He thus greatly opposed materialism and industrialization, which ,in his opinion ,brought about the degeneration of people’s spirit and the ruin of original beauty in the world. In his days ,his hometown, Concord, was the center of American Renaissance and the locus of many lecturing activities which provided him the chance to give mang lectures about nature and encourage people to respect wilderness. But despite his active role both as a writer and a thinker in his time, he was somewhat ignored by his contemporary critics. Only with the coming of the global environmental crisis and the rise of various environmental movements did he begin to draw critical attention, for in his works depicting the beauty of nature and concerning human-nature relationship, crisis detected not only a personal experiment with a natural life but also a holistic philosophy of the relationship between man and nature. Graduating from Harvard in 1837,Thoreau returned to Concord to teach in the local grammar school ,but resigned abruptly in only his second week on the job, declaring himself unable to inflict corporal punishment on misbehaving pupils. In the ensuing months, Thoreau sought another teaching job unsuccessfully. It was around this time that Thoreau met Ralph Waldo Emerson, a prominent American philosopher, essayist, and poet who had recently moved to Concord. The friendship between the two would eventually prove the most influential of Thoreau’s life. Emerson was the figurehead of the Transcendentalist movement. Transcendentalism drew heavily on the idealist and otherworldly aspect of English and German Romanticism, Hindu and Buddhist thought, and the tenets of Confucius and Mencius. It emphasized the individual heart, mind, and soul as the center of the universe and made objective facts secondary to personal truth.