(1817–62)
a US writer and poet who believed strongly in the rights of individual people. As an experiment he lived a simple life for two years (1845–7) in a small wooden house near Concord , Massachusetts , and then wrote about this in Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854). He also wrote the essay Civil Disobedience (1849), a work that influenced such leaders as Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King to protest in a peaceful way.
See also transcendentalism .