Of all of the figures surveyed in this essay, Henry David Thoreau is perhaps the most radical and is the clearest precursor of 1960s “hippie movement.” Thoreau is probably most famous for his book Walden (1854), which details his experience of living alone in the wilderness on Walden Pond. He uses the narrative of his …
Like Melville, Emerson also sought to escape completely from the Christian heritage of New England. But rather than speaking of a return to paganism, Emerson argued that each generation is able to directly apprehend divine truth through its own experience, thus making religious tradition unnecessary. In his famous essay Nature (1836) Emerson writes, “Our age …
Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick (1851) is known primarily as a whaling adventure, but the book also features a thoroughly anti-Christian and pro-pagan message. In the early chapters of his novel the narrator Ishmael begins a friendship with the Polynesian Queequeg, with whom he is forced to share a room (and a bed) at an inn. …
The current miserable state of America can in many ways be traced to the worldview developed by New England humanists in the mid-19th century. While we have seen that some of these humanists, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, were vaguely aware of the problems caused by industrialization and other social changes, they were not able to …