Although an author's biography is always to some degree relevant to the study of his or her writings, a remarkable unity existed between Henry David Thoreau's life and his work. Thoreau's deliberately lived life and his writings were dual expressions of the same underlying principles and aspirations.
One of the major authors of American Transcendentalism, lecturer, naturalist, student of Native American artifacts and life, land surveyor, pencil-maker, active opponent of slavery, social critic, and almost life-long resident of Concord, Massachusetts, Thoreau was born David Henry Thoreau on July 12, 1817, in his grandmother's house on Virginia Road in Concord, which is close to Boston and Cambridge. In 1635 it was the first inland settlement in Massachusetts. The scene of the first armed resistance of the American Revolution on April 19, 1775, Concord was, in 1817, a vigorous place, home to the courts of Middlesex County, a beehive of artisan activity, trade, and politics as well as a farming community. Thoreau was baptized in the First Parish — the church in which as an adult he would decline membership — on October 12, 1817.
His father, John Thoreau (1787–1859), storekeeper and pencil-maker, was of French Protestant descent. Jean (John) Thoreau (1754–1801), Henry's grandfather, born on the Isle of Jersey, came to America in 1773 and became a successful merchant in Boston. He married Jane Burns in 1781. In 1799, he bought part of what is now the Colonial Inn building in Concord and moved his large family there in 1800.
Henry's mother, Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau (1787–1872), was born in Keene, New Hampshire. On her mother's side, she descended from the Loyalist Jones family of Weston, Massachusetts. Her mother, Mary Jones, married the Reverend Asa Dunbar in 1772, was widowed, and married Captain Jonas Minott — who owned the farm where Thoreau was later born — in 1798.
