বায়োগ্রাফি: Henry David Thoreau is renowned for his book Walden, a expression on simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay "Civil Disobedience" (originally published as "Resistance to Civil Government"), an argument for noncompliance to an unfair state. He was always a keen abolitionist, giving lectures that criticized the Fugitive Slave Law while admiring the works of Wendell Phillips and shielding the abolitionist John Brown. Thoreau's idea of civil defiance later effected the political thoughts and actions of such prominent figures as Mahatma Gandhi, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Walt Whitman, Leo Tolstoy, W. B. Yeats, Ernest Hemingway, Emma Goldman, E. B. White, George Bernard Shaw, Glenn Gould and many others. Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, in a modest New England family of John Thoreau and Cynthia Dunbar. David Henry was named after his paternal uncle, David Thoreau. He had 3 siblings. None of them were married. Henry David died at age 44 of tuberculosis.