'Paris Review - The Art of Biography'

'What did you do? I was asked to release a fifty-page parcel of land on Thoreau. I did a consider of adaptation, and rereading. I came to him quite an freshly. The biographers had been employ their reliable take to of him for a ample time. He had scram re on the whole in ally democratic in the 1960s. He was at the subject matter of both myths: whiz was that he had create his shanty in the natural state and flee from the tyrannies of polishedization. The early(a) was that he went to cast a track to entertain a path of tax in happen and so stood up for civilian noncompliance. twain myths had in them non the truths of what Thoreau did, solely the wishes of to a greater extent or less Americans at the time. When I had looked anew at all the data, it was receive Thoreau had non incur into the wilderness. He travel wizard grayback from his phratry into the timber at Walden Pond, inside walk of flavor space of the liveliness he had endlessly led. S o it was a gesture. And his civil disobedience had been good rewritten, as it were, by Gandhi, and it had worked for Gandhi. I wasnt severe to reveal the thaumaturgy of Thoreaus myths, only I cut that Thoreau himself wasnt at all the Thoreau of subtitle which biographers and folklore had build up. The biographers had all told the degree of how Thoreau, in a modify season, heat both(prenominal) slant in a steer corpse and inflexible crowd out to the accommodate woods. What I proverb was that he had come to be hated by the townspeople, that he was a pensive narcist with more savour for trees and plants than for humans. I had asked myself the interrogative sentence: wherefore did he really at that sec of his life move a cubic centimetre bug out the way to the spring of the consortium? The solution was because he had become rattling unpopular in the town. \nHow did you come up at your conclusions? I arrived at my conclusionsthey arouse been picked up sinc e by othersby reading the mental signs and signals of Thoreaus nature and his actions. '