| The 19th-century American writer Henry David Thoreau wrote philosophical essays in which he criticized social institutions and celebrated nature and individualism. Thoreau surrounded himself with only basic essentials when he went to live for a time at Walden Pond, and he wrote about simple living in his most famous book, Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854). In his influential 1849 essay, “Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau advocates the concept of passive resistance. |