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>> you are watching booktv on c-span2 with top nonfiction books and authors every weekend. booktv, television for serious readers. here are some programs to look out for this weekend. weekly author interview program, the relationships in the financial and political world in all president's bankers. military historian ed oz we returned to germany but offensive on america's east coast in 1924. and former assistant attorney general john you organizes international law little effect on the behavior of powerful nations. watch these authors and many more this weekend on booktv on c-span2. and for the full schedule of authors and books visit us at booktv.org. >> michael sims recount henry david thoreau's education and have the budget is writing career which included his fathership of walden. offer reports the harvard graduate who built a cabin on ralph waldo emerson's properly where he lived and wrote for two years was more than a recluse he is often remembered as. this is about 50 minutes. >> the bottom line is i like to tighten. thank you very much for coming out today and i was wondering if it was going to rain on me and i was thinking i shouldn't be worried about that because it is henry david thoreau and you shouldn't worry about such things and my wife loved to tweak because she has tolerated thoreau around a house for two years, she has taken to tweaking famous quotations such as the web enterprises that require new clothes unless it is something you already had your eye on. and so now she makes me very self-conscious when i'm thinking i worry about raising my boys are giving a talk and henry david thoreau. thank you, wonderful book store that i have been in several times in the past. i did not return to concord when i was writing this book because i wanted to keep the nineteenth century in my head, not a 21st century so i was completely immersed in primary sources of the era and had a 3 dimensional aerial view of concord on july 4th, 1845, the actual date and remove into the cabin. i kept that on the wall beside my desk and was completely surrounded by the atmosphere of the mid-19th century. i was afraid to come here because i was afraid a parking lot might ruin it for me. the other thing that would like to address, the pronunciation of his name. locals and family members and scholars, there are no family members now, know that he was born david henry thoreau. the accent on the first syllable. people, readers of his pronounced it thoreau if they didn't know him or know the area because it looks french and it turns out was. his family was from new jersey, french dominated island in the channel. cell darrell issa two generations away from the pronunciation that is thoreau and change it here. i don't think it matters very much and i slipped in and out of it. if we learn to live that ernest hemingway pronounces name hemingway very few of us would bother to do that so i tend to go in and out of the pronunciation in part depending on who i am talking to. if i know they know more about i try to say thoreau. having spent close time with him for two years as i did i tend to call him henry. the book is a very close-up personal almost novels like look at his early years. i don't mean anything fictional at all, just very textured and detailed and a lot of dialogue from primary sources those throughout the book i call him henry. no doubt i will fall into that so i need to start appropriately with a quotation by ralph waldo emerson who said of his old friend he was free and strange. and the one thing i keep coming back to was henry was very, very strange and that was the exciting part of this, the personality and character in getting that paper. at times it felt was wrestling five girl into one little cage and worked but to me when i look at the book it almost vibrates with the tension of getting those characters and personalities into the same book. a lot of people come down on one side or the other or feel they ought to. they become a thoreau idolater or acolyte or decide they are critic of his or an enemy of his, that he was a fraud in some way or whatever. i felt no desire to do that. i am just interested in the reality. he was a very important writer to the beginning in my teen years and hugely influential in my life but i am not interested in hero worship anymore and i'm interested in trashing the more showing he had feet of clay. and that made it fun to write. handed great deal of his life, and various synonyms and alternative ways, and it was a huge amount on a very deep level and superficial level, over all year long period and daily effort of fun in the research and writing of the book. and i hope that shows on the page. because henry was a paradox. he was an oxcart of paradoxes and what makes him poignant to read about i think, the book is half full with land have melancholy and makes him funny to read about because he was a very sarcastic, lively, caustic wit, so he can be very funny knowing he was fortunately for me as a writer and as a reader he can be funny in many ways he was totally unaware of which is almost more interesting to write about so in my story i don't, because i don't have to cover his entire life and i don't have to trudge from significant accomplishment significant accomplishment i am able to zoom in and focus on things so i don't play profit and i don't look ahead. i don't analyze or criticize or critique. i just try to convey the story as much in the year as i can so i am writing in third person voice in and out of the minds of hawthorne and his wife and emerson and two with three of the young children who were in the school run by henry and his brother john sell all of those primary sources to meet given a lot of texture and make it feel more alive and fraud on more characters and felt like a busy little movie. as i talked-about i kept seeing fema and set a chapter or something like that. he said i you writing a movie or book? i found so much gorgeous original material with texture of that it feels like a movie at times because there was so much dialogue written down an hour later by the participants and they would write down what their thoughts were across town somebody else would be writing a letter with their experience, the same event, and there would be a news story telling everything about the weather and to the famous people were present, there is some much texture, dialogue and detail that it comes alive in a way that completely captured my imagination and i love biography and i read biographies obsessively and occasionally i get frustrated with some of them because they seem to forget that these people didn't know they would amount to anything. they didn't know they would become famous, they didn't know anyone would care, they didn't know anyone would be poring over their letters and diaries 150 years later or they would have been more discreet definitely. you can tell when sir writers as you do research in literature over the years that writers reach a certain point when they think they have become important or have signed over to donate their papers, their correspondence gets more cautious which is very interesting and then disappointing. they had none of that at the time. there's lively critique, a lot of people participating in gathering and going home saying i am sure he means well but he is an 80 or whatever and a lot of those details make come a live in a beautiful way for me and i kept thinking and reminded myself these people did not even know, just like us, just like everyone in this room if they would get through the day. they didn't know if they would live until tomorrow. they certainly had no glimpse of ever being important so i want to -- wanted to include in this book something that i think occasionally disappears from biographical writing which is the thing that keeps us getting up every morning and looking ahead, suspense. if you don't already know the details of henry thoreau's like you'll be surprised because there is so much more to him than i encountered in high school when basically -- i loved my high school teachers and loved the english courses and don't mean any critique of them but a lot of times these people like in the norton anthology of literature you are presented work but at the same time you are expected to pat the marble dust of the icon and i didn't want to dust off the icon. that had been done plenty of times. i wanted to try to find henry before he was pharaoh -- thoreau, the patron saint of environmentalism and civil liberties and certainly but men best expressed in the nineteenth century the sense of how do you live a life in which you have self-respect and a sense of worth and have your own direction but you are participating in the world at the same time and no one else in the era expressed those things so well so i was working on the proposal for different book which i don't need to talk about here but i will come to that. when i was reading the diaries of peabody hawthorne who was -- married nathaniel. are bring the hawthornes a lot because they knew henry quite well so i start with them the day they moved to concord and wanted them in part because they offer a different view than emerson's view of henry but they come in after the story has been going for a while and also because they're deeply in love, absolutely warm and fuzzy and out of focus over each other. so that contrast with henry's lonely life in which he keeps having a crush on one girl or one after another and nothing coming of it, he was a man who emerson said if he came through the back door of the emerson house and went to the kitchen and uncounted woman he blushed. anywhere he encountered a woman so the contrast with hawthornes being in love seemed to add a little poetic resonance to the story, and emotional depth but also a different point of view as a new character coming in and seeing henry. so i was reading hawthorne's diary and came across a scene that is of no historical significance of this is not going to go on the quiz. it is of no literary importance whatsoever but it is a wonderful little human moment that to me brought all these people to life in ways that i had not really thought of limbo for so what i am going to read is a couple paragraphs from my books that is the result of my encountering this scene in her diary and researching it in a bunch of other sources and piecing it together. the wonder of 1842-43 with a cold, difficult time in concord with the thermometer sinking to its lowest point in recent memory. despite their hard work of foreigns raced into winter like children. the first snowstorm found him in sleepy hollow east of the square where cut stalks of the summer's field of indian corn late buried under snow. the newly weds slid down hills together, their laughter echoing from the pier middle chestnut trees and the arms of the hoax that surrounded the hollow on all sides. the slow current froze quickly in winter after flooding lowlands for miles, providing wide, clean surfaces for skating. she liked to run and slide on the ice instead of skating. often they saw other skaters, always boys and young men, never women. few women skated. josiah bartlett's white's sister visited concord in the early 1820s, she impressed the locals by skating with energy and grace, concord women were slow to follow her daring example at least publicly. one afternoon, henry and emerson joins hawthorne for escaping party. i watched from the window as they paraded by on the river. at home on the ice from countless foray since childhood henry led the way with an energy and abandon that was both impressive and ungainly. as if suddenly ecstatic he cavorted in what she soon described her friend as dances and leaps. she sounded slightly embarrassing. hawthorne was riding across the surface with his usual slalom race, appearing to adoring eyes like a greek statue. then came emerson seeming half asleep, tilting forward at least until his top hat was horizontal, as if he napped by reclining on the air itself. soon exhausted, emerson came indoors to rest. he said her husband reminded him of a tiger whose energy might be the death of an ordinary mortal such as himself. he beamed his kind smile at her. mr sought hawthorne is such an age baxley to can cope with it? thus began my research for what became the adventures -- "the adventures of henry thoreau". the other book died on the vine at least for now. there is a have written proposal in a 4 in my desk at home in western pennsylvania. "the adventures of henry thoreau". i had to defend the title little bit with the publisher. i defended, thoreau was not an ivory tale idealist, a thinker sitting with his chin in his palm. he led a very busy life. in this book which ends in 1846 halfway through his time at walden he found that a progressive private school with his brother. he prevents the forest fire that he started. he faces his own illnesses and the death of various loved ones, one of whom literally dies in agony in his arms. he falls in love. he asks the same girl to marry him and is rejected by her, that his brother had two month earlier asked to marry a man was rejected by her. so there's a lot of human crazy wonderful adventures in there. and he has a traumatic spiritual revelation atop a mountain in the wilderness in maine and he spends a very small and unimportant night in jail. until he makes it important by being the person who wrote best about the concept of civil disobedience and creating 25% fictional autobiographical i as narrator so that was very interesting to me so it was such fun to recreate the texture and detail of these things like the night in jail. what could he for hear from the window. and find a definite things that were happening on that day and what did he say in his journal and so on. you may not know that henry thoreau spend six months on staten island working as a tutor to emerson's brothers. that was fun. that was the most fun i ever had as a writer, taking henry thoreau to staten island and recreating what it was like. and sporty i wheeled the evans dodging people in the crowds, driven by decree servants, a hulking workmen dragging giant blocks of ice, still covered in the insulating sawdust down to basement level oyster bars and a vagabond slime of manhattan, wild, straight exacted is if they found on the island and were everywhere in the street so getting all these details was i think as much fun as i ever had when sitting at my desk and after -- i have to seek to coming back to his personality and character. i found it fascinating to try to wrestle the underpaid and despite the glorious revelations of the human genome project, personality and character are still a mystery and how he got to be the way he was, and how the influence others and the weird out chemical way one person can be a catalyst in another person's life, all of those things were so much fun to try to track down at the same time asking myself what did the cab and smell like, what did it sound like a walking down the street and concord in 1841 at night on an average day and then the 1840 presidential campaign came through. it was the first grassroots, outrageously rowdy campaign of american history and it changed everything because it was entirely about nepotism. they presented each -- i call them characters, each of the presidential candidates, there was a largely fictional version of each one set up against a largely fictional version of the other one and they went head to toe in the public imagination, have almost nothing to do with the real people. edition we have proudly -- or getting all of these details is so exciting for me and i am sure you know this living here, he was not a hermit, he was not hiding out, not a monk, he was caught up in the life of the town and his friends and family, very doting, adoring son and brother and he lived his life in concord and admitted that he considered what he called homeopathic gossip, to be as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves and the keeping of frogs and in some anywhere surprise is like that, so you realize gradually the family had a boarding house that was very rowdy and busy all the time. the cabinet walden was a study, was a private workspace and hang out where he could get peace and quiet without hearing someone practicing the piano or playing in the kitchen and everyone going up and down the stairs at the different stranger at the breakfast table every morning. he said his family house every day, every day or two, and there is the classic line of food did his laundry and they took cupcakes to the cabin or whatever. he built the house the family lived in and was there every couple days to keep running it and work on it and he constantly kept track of everything. he was the handiest writer in the history of literature as far as i can tell because i have to tell you we are not generally the most useful people in the whole world and henry could fix anything, he could make anything, and i am still bragging about changing the door knob six years after it happened so henry was not like anyone else in literature that i have run a grass and part of it is he was very anchor in the real world. i want to read one paragraph, a description of him in his college years. not all of henry's classmates knew the 5 foot 7 yokel was the unkempt with brown hair. he had a distinctive shape, sloping shoulders led to long arms contrasting with short legs and some recognized him by his unusual and purposeful stride which reminded them of an indian. he took a shortcut whenever possible sometimes walking with his hand bob heintz is back clinched into fists at his side. during his years in cambridge he often kept to himself. the students noticed his earnest expression as you walk across campus with his eyes on the ground distracted as if looking for something he had lost. he tended to dominate conversation and even turn it into a monologue. otherwise is self absorption and awkwardness became standoffish this. but his earnest excitement transcended the quirky personality and attractive young men who were equally serious about life. a few internet france witnessed henry's love of natural history, his tendency to notice animals more than people. of playful imaginative side. is ecstatic response to nature and love of kittens. his obsession with indians and the notion of a noble savage life. his fondness for rural characters rather than what he saw as staid textbook, friends knew that because of his practical side at 16 he built his own boat and before approving his enrollment in college at harvard his parents had considered apprenticeing him to a cabinetmaker. another thing you won't find in a story about frost. the period he began to be interesting was when he began to disappoint emerson because there's a great deal of transcendentalist thinking that is sort of platonic in the sense of the grand ideals behind the realities that we see, everything we see is an image of a greater reality and everything around us is in that sense listened to the day. end purely symbolic and that is an outrageous simplification and feel free to jump on that. so at the point that henry begins to be interested less in symbolic bird and very specifically paying attention to the particular. day in front of him as an individual creatures that had a history and had experiences and was just as real as he was, at that point henry became little less interesting to emerson and more interesting to the rest of us. he was reading darwin and was a huge fan of travel writing so he read the voyage of the be the land was proud and ready money original species came out and could see the ideas that the earth was a whole lot older than ancient hebrew shepherd's realized which was not exactly surprising. the book ends in 1846, half way through the walls and years. includes a wonderful moment to me, wonderful moment when he is literally plumbing the depths of walden pond, an image he had used symbolically in the past and very carefully goes out on the ice one winter and drills hundreds of holes and carefully measures and does a detailed cross section which appears in many books about him of the pond, every little corner, every little cove and measured it precisely and before that it had been described as bottomless, as so many are. he said no, it is this many so those of the kinds of ways he was becoming more and more attuned to the world around him. there is one last point i want to make and i want to read two more, i that will give you an example of style, so excited about this book, about riding at that something you see disappearing in the early biographies of him and later on in a couple other things, it is the role of the women in his life. they start to vanish and an example is the 1970 play the night thoreau spent in jail which is a very annoying one because when jerome lawrence and robert we were working on it they carefully did their resources and played very fast and loose with it. henry had two sisters who were very bright and they talked, wrote letters to him in latin and for an important influence on him. his mother and two sisters were founding members of the concord female antislavery society, one of many important active anti slavery societies that white women were leading in the sense at this time of the white role in slavery and hugely influential and so all of those affects if you look at that are taken away and they argued a long time to get emerson to be involved in abolition in that play, they take call her eloquent words out of her mouth and put them in henry's mouth. both the sisters vanish, they disappear. the girl that both boys referred to was never student but becomes a bimbo, doting student. his mother who was very smart and outspoken and interesting becomes a sort of nag. was interesting to me to see all of this happening, to see it -- i don't mean scholars are erasing it. in various works of art in popular culture and earlier biographies there was a tendency to watch all that aside. it didn't fit the image. part of the fun was bringing so many female characters back into it. it makes me think of the play guess who is coming to dinner. the whole point of which is black men are equal and real as the white men in the play and all the women are presented pretty much as silly. and katharine hepburn in the movie. as you know, the nineteenth century was a time of rampant illness, there were very few safeguards against the illness and disease and wounds other than the darwinian one of a hearty constitution which may be in nature's bottom line, it could be tragic on a personal basis. as we all know, and i think we forget, every work of art or attempt at a work of art and i'm going to presume this will include biographical writing and works of art is a form of self portrait. and at every level we are in part we are presenting ourselves i notice nonfiction writers being drawn to topics that seem objectively chosen out of intellectual interest but are drawn to the minister away from a certain angle at a certain time in their lives so this was very much happening with me during this book and while i was writing and researching this book everything was going on in my life. my niece was killed in a tornado, and adults niece so i went to tennessee and in response to that death might 85-year-old mother had a very severe massive stroke so i spent a month in tennessee taking care of her. the week she has the stroke we learn my wife is pregnant with our first child so instantly the odds are those two trains will pass and our child will not meet my mother which is what happened so after months down there taking care of her during which time because work distracts me and i had a contract and bills to play and spent a month in tennessee there were times when she would go to sleep and i would be holding her left hand and this is in her last couple weeks of life and balancing on my lap and typing with just one hand and then my son was born a few months later. i have those. i may be the most pathetically doting father of all time which is sad i am sure from the outside. i would be holding the newborn son in this arm and realize i was sitting in the dirt crying while typing and i realized my hands had connected the generations and the circle of life became more and more real to me and writing became my way of responding to all of in the course of doing this book. with that background the idea of the circle of life, the risk of loss that accompanies loving anyone, adult or child, i want to close with a brief passage from another scene in my book which is no historical significance, not literally important. henry's period was great fun to write about in part because so many things were happening that laid the groundwork for what became our era. in sane dreamers had presumed to imagine instantaneous communication and finally there was the telegraph and people had created the first form of movement that did not involve animals or wind which is trains and so everything was changing in this way. henry was fascinated with all of this and there was a development that came along at exactly the same time in the middle of my story that is my favorite invention from history. photography. .. >> it is the sense of their everyday life and that they are just as real as we are. i think that that explains everything. this is the aftermath of the emerson death. they were the first generation to produce this new invention, which had been announced as recently as 1839 at a meeting at the academy of sciences in paris has already been touted as a miraculous machine to preserve time. originally photographic exposures have taken hours or days. over the last couple of years the process has been improved. a positive image reverse as if in a mere was produced directly on a silver iodine copperplate. the result was so sensitive to smudging that it had been isolated underclass under a folding case. it still required exclusive namely slow exposures to children had to be coaxed into this. the previous autumn others have been unable to talk waldo into this to capture his image with the camera. only john had prevailed. at his behalf that they at the photography studio, he was dressed in a girlish smock had sat with his hands folded in his lap. thus after his death, the emerson's good days at a framed daguerreotype of waldo. his hair was parted in the middle and has sculpted and thin lips select his mothers had to remain gray and still. like the unrecorded movements of people strolling paris boulevard as he took his early photographs, laughter wasn't invisible. even smiles faded while the inhumanly patient charter we differ like to sleep then. the person's likeness distilled these and the fleeting gestures and smiles and the sparkle of life were lost. thank you. [applause] [applause] >> if i was a better person i would know how much time we had for questions and answers. >> okay, we are good. so someone here will tell me and the q&a is my favorite part. because i had some idea on how to take the scenic route for this with questions and comments. i will do a sympathetic song and dance prey and then pretending that i do know the answer if i do not. [laughter] >> yes, sir two. >> i would like to know quite a bit more about thoreau. in one of the episodes that you described, it seems as though i was wondering if you could elaborate a little bit more. it because it said that it was a letter from lucy jackson said that let this pass me and i didn't know what the source of that was. but do you ever need more information? because you know a lot about henry thoreau and his spiritual journey. >> that is a very good point. i had so many footnotes that i was at the last second cutting and combining. it is possible that i snipped this and it will magically reappear in the paperback. so it is entirely possible and i can tell you in the background and john was more traditional. very calm and considered a gentleman. and they use the phrase ak3 gentleman. and they use the phrase akeley minded gentleman. he didn't want to hear a negative comment about any other boys. and he was very much more traditional. he wrote about dying and death. they are quoted in his eulogy and he was much more traditional in many ways. and he was patient with everyone and their affection for each other was so interesting to me. and john is the second most important character in the book. definitely more religious in his thinking in that way. and he became aggressive towards religion while still having a guy behind nature and the design of the world. >> i thought it was poignant and humorous at the same time i'm a good listener and. >> could you talk more about it? >> john always wanted to make everyone around him feel good when he was right there. he was dying, he was beginning to arch and do this and that. and this was the ancient latin term for what seemed to be on the face of those who died from tennis. and so the moment that his jaw muscles and throat muscles were locking up, he sat down and talked about poetry and literature. and, you know, that was sweet and funny and poignant and i got very much into the story. but then i had a brother die on me as well. >> yes, ma'am two. >> i know that he wrote on civil disobedience because he was rebelling against taxes. so i thought i wonder where he would be in this situation and i think about where he would be now. there are all kinds of different people that take them as their own. >> i've seen him quoted. and he is like shakespeare. and he paid his school tax and he felt that he paid his road tax. but he eventually stopped paying this, part of this that went to supporting the larger federal government in participating in supporting and still getting along with the slaveholding southern state and financing the mexican war which more considered a hugely aggressive act on our part. so i think now he would be -- easily the kind of person and he was often saying that he could never resist a newspaper. and he would buy some buy some food in the village and then he would lean in to read the stained piece of newspaper because he was that desperate toys read something. so i think he would be caught up in everything. and he really might be the most sarcastic person on twitter. so who knows what he would do. but the role of the roots and seeds of the civil disobedience essay are all in the book during the time in which he goes to jail. so makes it interesting to me what a fabulous writer he was. because he was not that original. he had already gone to jail briefly for not paying this and i think charles was utopian. and so he was, as he often was, imitated. and in that way henry thoreau reminds me of the cost so very much. he could do absolutely anything. but he approached each new period of his work and his life lake a giant devouring a meme that would come into a new corner of art and gobble up everything and begin by imitating and to me, henry was like that. he took emerson that way. he completely worked his way through. so i have a one year old and so i started to talk about this in the way that they wonder what. the deepest analogy you'll ever get. [applause] >> so the origins of that show that because of this aspect they really only spent one evening in jail that he very easily could have gotten out of area incident on his taxes were paid he was furious and he refused to leave in the jail instead, if you don't leave, i'm going to throw you out. [laughter] >> so then by the time he's walking out the door and he's beginning to think of ways to magnify the experience into a symbolic gesture and what it comes back to is that he was just the most amazing writer. and hemingway says that all of this goes back to huckleberry finn and i really think a vast amount goes back to walden. we see everyone moving toward and then you have to cross the bridge. >> as a writer, is there a particular ritual that you use to get into focus before you sit down to do your writing? >> extensive denial. [laughter] >> snacks. errands. [laughter] >> vaguely work-related e-mails. a lunch with somebody that i had done some work with but we do not discuss work or it's all of these things are part of this before we settle down and do it. but the best time is when i get up first thing in the morning which is no longer possible with a 1-year-old. but as soon as possible, get up and go straight to work in the morning. and i'm a morning person and my brain begins to feel like it's getting overworked by about 2:00 p.m. in the afternoon. so i also have to survive as a small businessman in the way. so i spent what would come out to a deeper week planning ahead, sketching out proposals and keeping this in various stages of completion. because i got tired of the downtime between books. so when i signed, i signed up for a new contract and whenever i do this i signed in and out of contract at the same time so that gets rid of the overlap. and there are lots of ways to make the more difficult sounding aspects of the career work. i got tired of doing lots of articles that i didn't deeply care about. and so invented the anthology series to take that out and make up the income and things like that. so the ritual, i would say, is to clear this. and he has this immortal line and i consider this to be the cost of how much i will call life that has to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long-term. and so i would say that in order to have the time to think them to write and to throw away a quarter of what i write, and to waste time and spend the entrance been my real scum i needed to keep my bills very small and have a low overhead operation. because it really requires time to think. that is more than you ask them less than you needed it. and i'm sorry. [laughter] >> the risk of free association. i apologize. >> you understand that if you don't ask a question, i'm a free associate. [laughter] >> anew that would work. >> yes, ma'am. >> so to did he have a thing for lisa may alcott? >> not that i know of. she came to town when she was nine, i think am i believe it was 1840. and so she later had a bit of a crush on him and works them into one of her later novels and i have to mention that as if he were planted in the audience coming to have given me the opportunity to quote what i think is the best insult the 19th century. so even though she had a crush on him. we know that she was a clear eyed sardonic wonderful brain. so she made this comment about henry thoreau. in that time they had to bear the sort of shaving of august here which makes it look as if you have been decapitated in your head has been set on a hedge. so does not that handsome of a looker. so got to be known that she thought he was attractive. and our people there are people here to correct me on the wording of this, but as well as i can remember, we think it will protect his virtue, his chin whiskers. [laughter] >> now would be shortened to no one will kiss that. [laughter] >> she did have a way with words, yes. >> the timeline. part of it is that you want to write stuff that you are excited about, but you have to survive in the real world. so a lot of it is timing. i will think about wanting to do a project and the question is one. and i have been the national speaker and one who is in the front row nodding at this moment. so the cause of that, i thought, it would now be a pretty good time. so my editor got on board and got very excited about it and the timeline needs to be quick in terms of this. i'm trying to do a substantive book, medium-sized, the real story reconstructed in a narrative form like this of the real people in the life that inspired him to create sherlock holmes. and so it is moody and freaky and cool. so part of the deal is that i finished the book quickly. my goal is christmas. but i have until next spring on the contract and publishers are dangerously accommodating to authors. and so my goal is christmas because with anything, there is a wave in a press and right now i checked the real world part of this to see where all the tv shows will work until bunch of things like that. >> this is my favorite variation and yes, i will mention about his bicentennial of his birth is three years from now and the next are the gold stamped for the centennial edition. so you have to survive in the real world so you just have to talk about the timing for things he already wanted to do. so i had no idea how long i could be talking. it could be monday afternoon for all i know. [laughter] >> two more questions. thank you, sir. >> and varied enormously. but originally it was so long that everyone was a little bit blurry and they finally get t
MexicoUnited-statesMaineTennesseeNew-jerseyGermanyPennsylvaniaCambridgeCambridgeshireUnited-kingdomParisRhôalpes support of gun rights, it's not a good thing to word the questions in particular way. i'd like you to answer to that, please. >> let's keep it brief because, basically, saying that you -- >> okay. so i did not word any of our survey items to get a particular response. they were worded to address a policy, what the policy did and what its purpose was. so i'll end it at that. >> okay. next question. >> i'm the maryland state leader for the well armed woman, and i believe in the training as well. and my big question to, you know, all the politicians, all the people and even you four up there is really -- can excluding emily, because i know she knows -- but really, do you really think, do we really think that criminals are going to obey the laws? laws are good. laws do help. but criminals do not obey laws. so my question is simple, and i know you've all heard it a million time, do criminals obey laws? they do not. >> sure. i'd love to take that one. >> actually i've been told we only have three minutes left, so let's each address the question, one minute apiece. here we go. >> well, i've heard that speeders don't obey the speed limit, so i think we should do away with speed limits. i mean, that logic that why have a law because someone's going to break it, i just don't buy. >> that's not what she said. >> that's precisely what she said. you said criminals don't obey gun laws, so why should we have them? no. the laws -- >> what she was saying -- >> all right, all right. >> let me just finish my sentence. >> two more sentences from daniel, and then we'll move on. >> sure. the policies are designed to hold people accountable so they don't put guns in the hands of prohibited people. so if there's no accountability, it will be very easy for them to get a gun. if -- >> all right, emily, we really only have a couple minutes. i'm sorry. emily, why don't you go ahead -- >> i think what you're saying is because daniel advocates for more gun control, more gun laws aren't going to reduce the 9,000 deaths because the guys -- they're not like me, they're not going to the police station, registering. bad guys, if they want to shoot you, if they want to have a life of crime, they're not going to go and register a gun because you give up your fingerprint, you give up your home address, they do a background check. and just to clarify earlier the person who was talking about background checks, we have a federal system, the fbi runs it. if you go to a dealer and buy a gun -- it happened for me and, i'm guess, i'm sure for everybody else op this panel who has a gun, they do a background check to see if you're a felon, to see if you're dangerously ill. we have a system in place. the problem is like we said we've got straw trafficking and other ways, the bad guys just know how to avoid those systems. >> all right. and, craig will wrap it up for us. >> criminals don't obey laws, and the nra has always vigorous lis supported prosecuting them to the maximum extent and so do i. >> there you go. how about a good round of applause for our panel. [applause] thank you. that was good. >> okay. oh, right, yes. the authors will be very grateful if you follow us on, down the yellow brick road here where we'll be signing copies of our books. [inaudible conversations] >> is there a nonfiction author a book you would like to see featured on booktv? send us a tweet e-mail at the booktv@c-span.org or tweet us at twitter.com/booktv. >> michael sims recounts henry david thoreau's formative education and the intellectual path that led to his writing career, which include his authorship of walden. the author reports that the harvard graduate who built a cabin on ralph waldo emerson's property where he lived and wrote for over two years was more than a recluse he is normally remembered as. this is about 50 minutes. >> the bottom line is i like to type. thank you very much for coming out today, and i was wondering if is going to rain on me and i was thinking i should be worried about that because it's henry david thoreau and your richard milk and. you worry about those things and my wife has tolerated henry thoreau around the house for two years while i was working on the book. is taken to tweeting famous quotations such as a where enterprises that require new clothes. and so now she makes me very self-conscious on thinking the things i can worried about where's my blazer when going to give a talk? thank you to the concord bookshop, a wonderful bookstore i've been several times and pass. i did not return to conquer while i was writing this book because i wanted to keep the 19th century in my head, not the 21st century. so i was completely immersed in the primary sources of the era and had john rowman staggered as three-dimensional aerial view of concord on july 4, 1845, the actual david henry moved into the cabin. i kept up on the wall beside my desk and was completely surrounded by the atmosphere of the mid-19th century. so i was afraid to come there because i was afraid a parking lot might ruin it for me. the very first thing i would like to address, the pronunciation of this thing. locals and from the members and scholars, there aren't any family members now, know that he was born david henry thoreau, and the accent on the first syllable, and people, readers of his pronounce it thoreau if they did nothing or the area because it looks french and it turns out it was. his family was from jersey, french dominated island in the channel. so there were only two generations away from the pronunciation that is thoreau and changed it here. so i just don't think it matters are much anti-flip in and out of the. if we learned was if we learned one of the ernest miller pronounces what actually hemingway, very few of us would bother to do that. site 10 to go in and out of the pronunciation i think in part dependent on who i'm talking to. if i know they know more about i try to stay thoreau. having spent up close time with him for two years as i said i tend to call them henry. the book is a very close up personal almost novel like look at his early years. in my novel like i don't mean anything sexual at all. very textured and detailed and a lot of dialogue from the primary sources. so throughout the book i call them henry. no doubt i will fall into the. so i need to start a properly with the quotation by ralph waldo emerson who said of his old friend, he was free and strange your and the one thing i keep coming back to was henry was very, very strange and that was the exciting part of this, was the personality and character in getting that on paper. at times it felt like i was wrestling five guerrillas into one little bitty cage and it worked but to me when i look at the book it almost vibrates with the tension getting all those personalities into the same boat. a lot of people come down on one side or the other or feel they ought to. city, a thoreau idolater or acolyte or they decide they're a critic of his or an enemy of his that he was a fraud in some way or whatever. i felt no worst to do the. i don't have an ax to grind if any kind. i'm just interested in the reality. he was an important writer jimmy beginning in my early years and early caching to to import in my life but i'm not interested in hero worship anymore that i am interested in trashing or showing he had feet of clay. that's what made it fun to write. and a great deal of his life was about various synonyms and alternative ways of saying fun. there was a huge amount on a very deep level and on several superficial levels, and over all year long period and on a daily effort of fun in the researching and writing of the book. i hope that shows on the page because henry was a paradox. he was an ox cart full of paradoxes and it is what makes him poignant to read about i think. the book is sort of half joyful and half melancholy and it makes them funny to read about because he was a very sarcastic, lively, caustic wit. so he can be very funny knowing he was. fortunately, for me as a writer every as a reader he could also be funny in many ways he was totally unaware of which is almost more interesting to write about. in my story i don't, because i don't have to cover his entire life and i don't have to trudge from significant accomplishment to significant accomplishment, i'm able to zoom in and focus on things i don't play profit and i don't look ahead. i don't analyze or criticize or critique. i just tried to convey the story as much in the air as i possibly can. so i'm writing in a third person void -- voice in and out of the minds of hawthorne and his wife and emerson and two or three of the young children who were in the school run by henry and his brother john. for all of those private forces to me to a lot of texture and make a few more alive and brought on more characters and made it feel like a busy little movie to do. as i talk about i kept saying seen in such after something like that. he said are you writing a movie or a book? i said i found so much gorgeous original material with texture that it feels like a movie at times. there was so much dialogue written down an hour later by the participants and do it right in with the thoughts were across counsel may also be writing a letter with their experience of the same event, and then it would be a new storytelling everything about the weather into the famous people were resident. there's so much texture, dialogue and detail that it comes alive in a way that completely captured my imagination. i love biography and i read biographies obsessively, and occasionally i get frustrated with some of them because they seem to forget that these people didn't know they would amount to anything. they didn't know they would become famous. they didn't know anyone would care. they certainly didn't anyone would be poring over their letters and diaries 150 years later, or they would've been more discreet definitely. you can tell when a certain writers when you do research in literature over the years, riders reach a certain point when they think they've become important are when they signed over to donate the papers, the correspondence gets -- correspondence gets more cautious. they had none of that at the time. there's a great deal of lively critique of each other, a lot of people participating in a gathering and then going home and saying i'm sure he means well but he's an idiot, or whatever. all of those details make it come alive in a beautiful way for me. i kept reminding myself these people did not even know, just like us, like f1 in this room, if they would get through the day. they did know if they would live until tomorrow. they certainly had no glimpse of ever being important. and so i wanted to include in this book something that f'ing occasionally disappear some biographical writings, which is the thing that keeps us getting up every morning and looking ahead, suspense. if you don't already know the details of henry thoreau's life, i think you'll be surprised about every five pages because they're so much more to him than i encountered in high school when basically -- i loved my high school teachers and i loved the english course of the i don't mean any critique of that but a lot of times these people like ken norton anthology of literature your present the work but at the same time your expect to pat the marble bust of the icon. i did want to does the icon. i felt that it been done plenty of times. i wanted to try to find henry before he was thoreau, before he was the patron saint of environmentalism and civil liberties and certainly the men who best expressed i think for the 19th century the sense of how do you live a life in which you have self-respect and a sense of worth and you have your own direction that you're participating in the world at that time. i think no one else in that era expressed all of those things so well. so i was working on the proposal for a different book which i don't need to talk about your book it didn't come to pass. when i was reading the diaries of hawthorne who was, who married nathaniel. and i bring the hawthorne -- hawthorns in a lot because they knew henry clay was lesser with them the day they moved to concord and i wanted them in part because the offer a different view than in recent years of hendrick but also because they come in after the story has been going for a while and also because they are deeply in love. they are absolutely warm, fuzzy, out of focus over each other. so that contrast with henry sloane the life in which he keeps having a crush on one girl or woman after another and nothing coming of it, and he was a man who emerson -- ambersons made significant to the back door and went to the kitchen and encountered a woman, he blushed to anywhere he encountered a woman. so the contrast with a hawthorns being in love seemed to me to add a little poetic resonance to the story, and emotional depth but also different point of view as a new character coming in and seeing henry. so i was reading hawthorne's diary and came across a scene that is of absolutely no historical significance, so this is not going to go on the quiz. it's of no literary importance whatsoever, but it's a wonderful human moment that brought all these people to life in ways that i have not really thought of them before. so what am going to read this a couple of paragraphs from my book that's the result of my encountering is seen in her diary and researching it in a bunch of other sources and piecing it together. the wonder of 1842-43 was a cold a difficult time in concord with the thermometer sinking to its lowest point in recent memory. despite their hard work, the hawthorns raced into intellectual. the first snowstorm found them in sleepy hollow just east of the square were cut stalks of the summer sealed of indian corn lay buried under snow. the newlyweds slid down hills together, their laughter at going from the chestnut trees and the nodded arms of the folks that surrounded the hollow on all sides. the concord grows -- after flooding lowlands for miles, thus providing wide, clean services force-feeding. she liked to run and slide on the ice instead of skating. often they saw other skaters, always boys or young men, never women. few women skated. when josiah bartlet's wife's sister visited concord in the early 1820s, she impressed the locals by skating with energy and grace. but concord women were slow to follow her daring example, at least publicly. one afternoon, henry and emerson joined hawthorne for a skating party. she watched from the wind as they paraded by on the river. at home on the ice from countless forays since childhood, henry led the way with energy and an abandoned that was both impressive and ungainly. as if suddenly a static he cavorted in which eason described to a friend as dances in leaps. she sounded slightly embarrassing. second them i was hawthorne driving across the service with his usual slalom grace, a peering to adoring eyes like a greek statue. then came emerson seeming half asleep, tilting forward at the waist until his top that was horizontal. as if he napped by reclining on the air itself. soon exhausted, emerson came indoors to rest. he said her husband reminded him of a tiger whose energy might be the death of an ordinary mortal such as himself. he deemed his famous kind smile after. mr. holder is such an agent. who can cope with it? thus began my research for what became the adventures of henry thoreau. the other book died on the vine at least for now. is a half written proposal in a drawer in my desk at home in western pennsylvania. "the adventures of henry thoreau," i had to defend the title a little bit with the publisher. i chose the word adventures because thoreau was not and i think our ideals, a thinker sitting with his chin in his palm your he led a very busy life. in this book with james and aching for sex halfway through his time at walden, he found a progressive private school with his brother. he faces his own illnesses and the deaths of various loved ones, one of them literally dies in agony in his arms. he falls in love your kid asks the same girl to marry him and is rejected by her that his brother had too much earlier asked to marry him and was rejected by her. so there's a lot of human crazy, wonderful adventures in there, and he has a dramatic spiritual revelation atop a mountain in the wilderness in maine, and he spends a very small and unimportant night in jail. until he makes it important i being the person who wrote best about the concept of civil disobedience, and creating about 25% fictional autobiographical i as a narrative, so those are interesting to me. so it was such fun to recruit the texture and detail of all these things, like the night in jail. what did he hear from the window? find a definite things are happening on that day and what did he say in his journal and so on. i have to mention he may not know that he spent six months on staten island working as a tutor to ambersons brothers children. that was fun. that was i think the most fun i've ever had a as a writer was taking henry thoreau off to manhattan and staten island and re-creating what it was like. sporty dodging people in the crowd, driven by livery servan servants, they're hoping workmen dragging giant blocks of ice still covered in the insulating sawdust down to basement level was to parse. and the vagabond slime of manhattan, the wild stray pigs acted as if they had founded and owned the island. they were everywhere industry. for getting all of the details once i think as much fun as i've ever had while sitting at my desk. i have to just say this, it kept coming back to his personality and characters. i just found that sitting to try to wrestle it onto the page. despite the glorious revelations of the human genome project, personality and character are still a mystery and how they got to be the way he was and how he influenced others and that weird alchemical way that one person can be a catalyst and another persons life, all of those things were so much fun to try to track down at the same time asking myself what did the cabin spelled like? what did he sound like walking down a street in concord in 1841 at night on an average day? and in the 1840 presidential campaign came through here. tippecanoe and tyler too. and it was the first grassroots outrageously rowdy campaign of american history, and it changed everything because it was entirely about style. they presented, each, i called and characters, each of the presidential candidates, those are largely fictional version of each one set up against a largely fictional version of the other one and they would head to toe in the public imagination and had almost nothing to do with the real people. a tradition which we have proudly continued ever since. getting all these details with exciting for me. i'm sure you know this living your. henry was not a hermit. he was not hiding out. he was not a monk. he was caught up in the life of the town and his friends and his family, a very doting, adoring son and brother. and he lived most of his life in concord as you know, and he admitted that he considered what he called homeopathic doses of gossip to be as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves and the peaking of world. and so many weird surprises like that were fun to me. you realize gradually because his family had a boarding house that was very rowdy and busy all the time, the cabin boldin was to study was a private workspace and hang out what he did to peace and quiet without hearing some impact in the can of that hearing everything cling in the kitchen and people going up and down the stairs and to give a stranger at the breakfast table every morning. so he said he was come his family says every day or so every day or two, there's the classic line of hooded thoreau's laundry. he helped build the house that the family lived in and was there every couple days to help keep running it and work on it, and be constantly kept track of everything. he was the handiest writer in the history of literature as far as i can tell because i have to tell you, we are naturally the most useful people in the whole world. henry could fix anything. he could make anything, and i'm so bragging about changing a doorknob six years after it happened. so henry was not like anyone else in literature that i've run across. part of it was who was very anchored in the real world. one paragraph from a description of them in his college years. not all of henry's classmates knew the five-foot seven google with the unkempt light brown hair. he had a distinctive shape, sloping shoulders led to long arms contrasting with short legs. some recognize him by his unusual and purposeful stride which reminded them of an indian. he took a shortcut whenever possible, sometimes walking with his hands behind his back or clenched into fists at his side. during his years in kimchee often kept to himself. some fellow student nurses earnest expression as he walked across campus with his eyes on the ground distracted as if looking for something he had lost. he tended to dominate a conversation and even turn it into a monologue. otherwise his self absorption and awkwardness became standoffishness. his earnest excitement transcended the plane features and quirky personality and attracted young men who are equally serious about life. a few intimate friends witnessed henry's love of natural history, his tendency to notice animals more than people. this plate on his imaginative side. is ecstatic response to nature and love of kittens. his obsession with indians and the notion of a noble savage life. his fondness for rural characters rather than what he saw as stated townsfolk. friends knew that because it is practical side, at 16 he had built his own boat, and before approving his a enrolled at college at harvard is been considered a practicing him to a cabinet maker. another thing you won't find in the story. so for many period that henry begins to be interesting is when he begins to disappoint emerson. because of its great deal of thinking that this sort of platonic in the sense of the grand ideals behind the realities that we see, that everything we see is an image of a greater reality and to everything around us is in that sense lessons and -- lessons and to symbolic, and that's it. and outrageous simple vacation. feel jump on that and trounce it. so at the point that henry begins to be interested less in a symbolic bird which is an abstract term, and very specifically paying attention to a particular blue jay in front of him as an individual creature that had a history and had experiences that day in which is as real as he was, i think at that point and it became a little less interesting to emerson and a little more interesting to the rest of us. he was reading darwin. he was a huge fan of travel writing so read the voyage of the beagle. he was very crowded and ready when the origin of species came out and could see the validity emelia the idea that earth was a whole lot older than people, that ancient hebrew shepherds realize which is not exactly surprising. so although my bookends in 1846, halfway through a waldin years, it includes a wonderful moment to me a wonderful moment when he is literally plumbing the depths of walden pond which an image is used symbolically in the past and very carefully goes out on the ice one winter and drills hundreds of holes and very carefully measures and goes into the detailed cross-section which there's a many books about him of the pond, every little corner, every little cove, and measured it precisely. before thabefore the independens bottomless, as so many ponds are. and he said no, it's actually this many feet. so those are the kinds of ways that he was becoming more and more attuned to the world around him. there's one last point of what to do and i'm going to read just two more paragraphs from the book that i think will give you an example of why i was so excited about this book and so excited about him and writing a. one of the points is something yoyou see disappeared in the eay biographies of him, and later on in a couple of other things i'm going to mention. it's the role of the women in his life. they start to vanish, and an example is the 1970 play the night thoreau spent in jail, which to me is a very annoying one because when jerome lawrence and robert lee working on it they clearly carefully did the research and then they played very fast and loose with it. henry had two sisters who were very bright, and they talked, wrote letters to him in latin, and they were an important influence on him. his mother and the two sisters were founding members of the concord female antislavery society, one of the many very important active at this labor societies that white women were leading in the sense that this time the white role in battling slavery. and hugely influential. so all of those effects if you look at the play are taken away. they argued a long time to get emerson to be involved in abolition. in the play they take all of her eloquent words out of her mouth and put them in henry's mouth. of the sisters vanished, they disappear. the girl that both boys proposed to was never a student of theirs but inflation becomes a sort of been boat, noting student. his mother who is very smart and outspoken and tough and interesting becomes a sort of nag. and so it was interesting to me to see all of this happening and to see it sort of, i don't mean scholars are erasing it. i mean injuries work of art and popular culture and earlier biographies there was definitely a tendency to wash that all aside but it didn't fit the image. so part of the fun for me was bringing so many female characters back into it. it makes me think of the play guess who's coming to dinner, the whole point of which is that black men are equal and real as the lightning into play. meanwhile, all the women are presented pretty much as silly and irrelevant. that's difficult to do with katharine hepburn but they did in that movie. as you know, the 19th century was a time of rampant illness. there was very few safeguards against illness and disease and loans, other than the darwinian one of the hardy constitution, which may be found with nature's bottom line but to be tragic on a personal basis as a still can now. so as we all know, and i think we forget, every work of art or attempt at a work of art, and of going to presume in this broad definition to include biographical writing an attempt to work of art, is a former self-portrait. and that whatever you are creating at whatever level you are in part presenting yourself, you are at the time. you may be drawn -- i've noticed on fiction writers being drawn to topics that seem objectively chosen of intellectual interest but their drawn to them in a certain way from a certain angle at a certain time in their life. so this was very much happening with me during this book. and while i was writing and researching this book, everything was going on in my life. my niece was killed in a tornado, an an adult needs, so t down to tennessee and in response to the death, if i don't mother had a very severe, massive stroke. so i spent a month in tennessee taking care of her. the week she has the stroke we learned that my wife is pregnant with our first child. so instantly the odds are those two trains will pass and our child will not meet my mother. which is what happened. so after a month down there taking care of her, during which time because work distracts me and i didn't a contract added to bills to pay and that's been a month down in tennessee, there were times when she'd go to sleep and i would be holding her left hand, and this is in or last couple weeks of life, and i'm bouncing a little black book on my lap and i'm typing with one hand. and then my son was born a few months later. i have photos. i may be the most pathetically doting father of all time. which is that i'm sure from the outside. i would be holding the newborn son in this arm and realize that there i was again sitting in the dark quietly typing. i realized that my hands had connected the generation. and the circle of life became more and more real to me, and writing became a way of responding to all of it in the course of doing this book. so on that note with that background, the idea of the circle of life, the risk of loss that accompanies loving anyone, adult or child, i want to close his talk with a very brief passage from another thing in my book that is absolutely no historical significance, not literarily important. henry's buried was a great fun to write about in part because so may things are happening then that laid the groundwork for what became our era. insane dreamers had presumed to imagine instantaneous indication and finally there was the telegraph. people had created the first form of movement that did not involve animals or wind, which is strange. so everything was changing in this way. henry was fascinated with all of this, and then there was a development that came along at exactly the same time in the middle of my story that is my favorite invention from history, photography. there was nothing before that was accurate record of anyone could ever known or loved or cared about. humid from england, you moved to the new world, that was it. no pictures, no connections. just a letter once a year if it didn't fall off a ship. so there's a spoiler alert here. a minor character doesn't appear for very long, emerson's five year old son, walter, dies in the course of the story, and i don't think that will mess it up for you because is there for a very short time. and i think these moments and this image sums up for me the excitement of trying to resurrect the past, the feel, the smell of it, the sense of everyday life, their everyday lives and they were just as real as we were. and i think it perhaps explained what i want to do that with concrete, walden pond and thoreau. this is the aftermath. the emerson for the first generation to possess a new kind of momentum after the death of a loved one, a daguerreotype. this new invention which has been announced as recent as 1839 at a meeting of the academy of sciences in paris was already being touted as a miraculous machine to preserve time. original photographic exposures would take hours or days, but over the last couple of years the process have been improved. a positive imag image reversed n a mirror was produced directly on a silver iodide coated copper plate. the result was so significant as much in it had to isolate underclass inside a friend or a folding case. daguerreotype portraits to record excruciatingly slow exposures. children posing for photographs had to be coaxed into premature sal and richard. the previous autumn, other friends and some members have been unable to talk wall though into sitting still long enough for the slow, boxy camera to capture his image. only john had prevailed. at his behest that they at the photography fashion photography student, waldo, dressed in the grossmont comments that any wooden armchair with his hands folded in his lap. after his death, the emerson's could gaze at a framed oval daguerreotype of waldo. his expression solemn and far away, his hair parted in the middle with the bangs combed sideways into temporary obedience. his scope to defend let's so like his mothers have had to remain great and still. like the and recorded movement of people strolling paris boulevards as the garrett took his photograph, laughter was invisible. even smiles faded while the infinitely patient chatter waited for enough light to see them. a persons like this could be preserved comcast billing memories into sober gray portrait magically drawn with the light. but the fleeting gestures, smiles, raised eyebrows, the sparkle of life were lost. thank you. [applause] >> if i were a better person i would know what time it is and how much some of the questions and answers. okay, we are good. so someone here will tell me, i do hope doing something fun, the q&a is my favorite part because i've some rough edges what i was doing although i kept wandering off for the scenic route on the comments. so i encourage you to say anything that strikes you as interesting, or ask a question you will always have wondered about. holiday song and dance pretending to participate. [inaudible] spent i thought i knew a lot about thoreau. i now know quite a bit more spent thank you very much spin one of the episode you describe in your, it seems as though, i was one if you could elaborate a little bit more because i guess it was a letter that john begin to feel calm,. [inaudible] trying to find what the source of that was. but do you have any more information about -- because you know a lot about henry and his spiritual journey. >> that's a very good point. i had so many footnotes that i was fiercely at the very last second cutting and combining. it is possible that i snipped the source fo for the annual magical repair in the paperback. i would am going over the book right now so it's entirely possible i did that but it does the source and i can say the background. henry was a much of the question and the one always being aggressively skeptical about the world, and john was very much more traditional, very calm and considered very much a gentleman, and the use the phrase very clean minded gentleman. he loved the girls of the village and did want to hear negative comments by the other boys. he was very much more traditional, and he wrote some verses about dying and death, which a romantic religious teenager might well do. they are quoted in his eulogy, a couple of the verses from that. he was much more traditional in very many ways to he was also the handsome brother, the popular brother. he was patient with everyone. he didn't have the traits that make come he didn't have the traits that make any so much more interesting to write about than john in a way. their affection for each other was so interesting to me. john is the second most important character in the first half of the book because the relationship is so interesting to me. but he was definitely much more traditional in his thinking and much more religious in that way. henry very quickly completely abandoned and became rather aggressive towards organized religion while still thank you very much there was a god behind nature and the design of the world. >> i found a poignant and humorous at the same time john said he was developing lockjaw. he couldn't really -- >> john was considered so lighthearted and easy going and i was wondering everyone around him feel good that he really was joking. he was dying right there and lockjaw, he was beginning to sort of arched into this. john was at the moment that his jaw muscles were locking up was saying to henry, sit down and talk to me about poetry and literature. to me that was sweet and funny and poignant, and i got very much into the story. but then i've had a brother die on me, too, so i think all that was in there. yes, ma'am. >> you mentioned, i know that thoreau wrote on the syllabus obese because he was rebelling against taxes, as i thought about, i wonder where he would be in this whole situation, where would he be now? they say all different kinds of people quote thoreau and taking as their own. >> yes. i've seen him quoted by democrats, republicans, libertarians, atheists, episcopalians, which is great but it's not like they're misrepresenting them but he is like shakespeare. he said something so incredibly well that you can pretty much pulled him up with many phrases. but he paid his school tax. he paid his road tax ricky bobby very much willing to purchase but in the neighborhood, but he eventually stopped paying for while his poll tax, part of which went to supporting the larger federal government and within participate in supporti supporting, still getting along with the slaveholding southern states and financing the mexican war, which more progressive people at the time considered a future unnecessary aggressive act on our part. so i think now he would be, he's really the kind of person that he was so involved and however much time he spent at walden, very little time really in the wilderness. he always said he never could resist a newspaper. he would talk about camping trips where they would buy some food in the village and then that night by the campfire henry would lean in to read the stained piece of newspaper because he was that desperate to always read something. so i think would be totally caught up in everything. he might be the most sarcastic person on twitter. who knows what he would do? the role of, the roots and seeds of civil disobedience essay are all in the book because it appeared in which he goes to jail, and it makes interesting to me what a fabulous writer he was because he wasn't that original. he was, as he often was, imitated, and in a way henry thoreau reminds me of picasso very much, and incredibly gifted address and who could absolutely anything, but he approached each new period of his work and life like a giant, creative, and devouring a need for that we come into a new corner of art and gobble up everything and begin but imitating and doing a version of the. to me e-mail henry was like tha. he took emerson that way. he completely worked his way through. so i think the origins of that show that because of the imitated aspect, because really he'll that one evening each of the could of gotten out of, and when his taxes were paid next morning he was furious. he refused to believe -- to leave, and the jailer said if you don't leave, i'm going to throw you out. so then it's like the time is walking out the door is beginning to think of ways to magnify the experience into a symbolic gesture when it comes back to, he was just the most amazing writer. and hemingway says that all of america let you go back to huckleberry finn, and i really think a vast amount of nonfiction goes back to walden. you see everything moving toward it and that's that you have to cross that bridge. you can't ignore it. >> as a writer, do you have a ritual that you used to get focus before you sit down to do it? >> extensive denial. snacks, errands. vaguely work-related e-mails. a lunch with somebody that i have done some work with but we don't discuss worker to all those things get in there before i settle down and do it. the best periods of a naked up first thing in the morning, which is no longer possible with a one year old. most of you in the room probably know that. but as soon as possible, get up and go straight to work in the morning. i'm a morning person, and my brain begins to feel like it's getting overworked by about two in the afternoon. i also have to survive as a small businessman in the ways i spend about what would come up to a day a week planning ahead, sketching out proposals, i keep bridge projects in different stages of completion but as i mentioned i edit a series of anthologies that i created because i got tired of the downtime between books, and so when i signed, i just signed a new contract for the origins of sherlock holmes but whenever i sign a contract i signed another contract at the same time so it gets rid of the overlap. the reason i mention that is there are lots of ways to make the more difficult sound aspects of the career work. i got tired of doing lots of articles that i didn't deeply care about. and so i didn't in the anthology series to take up that amount of money and make up that amount of income. so the ritual i would say is to clear -- that's a thoreau thing to he has this immortal line, i consider the cost of the same to be how much i'd call life has to be exchanged for. immediately or in the long run. and so i would say that in order to have the time to think and write and to throw away a quarter of what i write, and to waste time and spin my wheels i need to keep my bills very small. i need to have a low overhead operation. because it really requires time to think and breathe. that is more than you asked, and less than you needed, and i'm sorry. the risk of free association, i apologize. >> you understand that if you don't have a question i may reassociate more. >> did thoreau have a thing for louisa may alcott? was he one of the ones -- >> not that i know. she came to time when she was nine i think. i believe it was 1840, and so she later had a bit of the crush on him and worked him into one of her later novels. he's a character in one of the novels. and i have to mention as if you were planted in the audience, you have given me the opportunity -- to worry, no free association, to quote what i think is a very best insult of the 19th century. even though she had a crush on him she wrote as we know from reading are very clear eyed sardonyx wonderful brain. so louisa may alcott made his comment about henry. in that time, these are the photos we all know of them, the neck appeared where you would shave down here which make it looks as if you been decapitated and your head has been set on a hedge. not that handsome and look really. so i got to be known that henry thought that was attracted, and there are people who could correctly in the wording of this but as well as i can remember it, very close to, methinks henry's chin whiskers will protect his virtue in perpetuity. [laughter] >> now, it would be shortened to and nobody going to guess that. [laughter] >> she had a way with words. >> she did have a way with words, yes. >> changing the subject, could you tell us what the timeline is for your other work? >> the timeline. part of it again, the idea that you want to write stuff from your site about the check to survive in the real world. everything is promoted in the real world or not promoted. a lot of it is timing so think ahead about i want to do project and the question is when. i've bee been thinking i wantedo become operate a lot, done the anthology, i know this corner backwards and forwards and i've been a speaker at the baker street national meeting of sherlockian things like that, wonderful group of people. so because of that i thought, if i'm going to do a sherlock holmes book now with a pretty good time. some editor got on board, get very excited about it, and the timeline needs to be quick because, in terms of notice and attention on trying to get a subsidy the book, medium-sized, the real story reconstructed in a narrative form like this of the real people that inspired him to great sherlock holmes. right now i'm very in 1877. it is moody and atmospheric and creepy and cool. and so part of the deal is i finished the book quickly. my goal is christmas. i have until next spring on a
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