Sophia thoreau biography

  • Sophia Thoreau was.
  • Sophia Elizabeth Thoreau was an American editor.
  • Sophia - born two hundred years ago (June 24, 1819) - was the person most responsible for making Henry David Thoreau posthumously famous.

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    Helen and Sophia Thoreau, Henry David’s Amazing Sisters

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    Henry Thoreau wouldn’t have been Henry Thoreau without his sisters, Helen and Sophia Thoreau. Or his brother, for that matter. But John Thoreau got plenty of ink in the book A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Helen and Sophia, not so much.

    Helen and Sophia played huge roles in shaping the writer, naturalist and author who influenced Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela. Helen believed in him when others thought him a kook. He and Sophia grew so close toward the end of his life that a friend called them ‘like twins.’

    Sophia Thoreau’s favorite image of her brother Henry

    None of the Thoreau children married, and most of them, for most of their lives, belonged to the family household in Concord, Mass., along with aunt, uncles and servants. By all accounts, they had a happy home, marred only by early death.

    During Henry’s two years, two months and two days at Walden Pond, Helen and Sophia came to visit him. And he often came home to visit them.

    “Without such a stable and contented home life, Thoreau could not possibly have pursued his career in the way that he did,” wrote his biographer Laura Dassow Walls.

    The Yellow House

    The entire Thoreau family loved nature, and Sophia Thoreau in p

  • sophia thoreau biography

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    LIFE OUTDOORS Sophia Thoreau

    Sophia — born 200 ago (June 24, 1819) — was the person most responsible for making Henry David Thoreau posthumously famous. Henry was one of four children born to John and Cynthia (Dunbar) Thoreau: in birth order, Helen, John Jr., HDT and Sophia. None of them married. All of them taught at one time in their lives. All died relatively young, even for that era: Helen at age 37, tuberculosis; John Jr. at age 26, tetanus; HDT at age 44. Sophia survived her famous brother by 14 years before dying at age 57, from tuberculosis.

    Sophia was two years younger than Henry David. While Helen was described as the quiet Thoreau, Sophia was known to be talkative and opinionated, with a dramatic wit. Their mother and their aunts were all active abolitionists and members of the Concord Ladies’ Antislavery Society. Sophia and her sister also belonged to the Middlesex County Antislavery Society. At an 1844 convention, they signed a petition in favor of dissolving the country rather than being party to a country with states where slave ownership was legal. Prominent abolitionists visiting Concord — Parker Pillsbury, Loring Moody and John Brown among them — made their way to the Thoreau home. The family provided lodging and aid to fugitive slaves. Henry’s antislaver

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    Daguerreotype of Sophia Thoreau, ~1855 

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