Henry David Thoreau

The lines about simple living that circulate widely — the ones about going to the woods deliberately, about what a person actually needs — come from Walden, a book-length reflection on living simply in natural surroundings. That book is the main reason his name still turns up in talks about stripping life back to essentials.

The other half of his reputation rests on a single essay, "Civil Disobedience", in which he argued that a citizen may rightly refuse to obey an unjust state. It has been read ever since by people looking for a case that conscience can outrank law.

He was American, born in July 1817 at the Wheeler-Minot Farmhouse, and died in May 1862. He worked as a naturalist, essayist, poet and philosopher, and was a leading figure among the transcendentalists — a position that placed his writing on nature and on individual conscience at the centre of that movement rather than at its edges.