Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau was an American essayist, naturalist, and philosopher, the most enduring figure of New England Transcendentalism after his mentor Emerson. His two major works — Walden (1854), an account of two years living deliberately in a cabin he built himself, and "Resistance to Civil Government" (later called "Civil Disobedience") — gave the world both the ideal of voluntary simplicity and the political theory of non-violent resistance that influenced Tolstoy, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King.