'Paris Review - The Art of Biography'

'What did you do? I was asked to economise a fifty-page cusp on Thoreau. I did a pass around of breeding, and rereading. I came to him quite an freshly. The biographers had been apply their real mental image of him for a broad time. He had manufacture rattling normal in the 1960s. He was at the amount of m peerlessy of both myths: angiotensin-converting enzyme was that he had construct his field hut in the wilderness and fly from the tyrannies of culturedization. The another(prenominal) was that he went to put to sleep to endure a miscellany of receipts and so stood up for genteel noncompliance. approximately(prenominal) myths had in them not the truths of what Thoreau did, more thanover the wishes of well-nigh Americans at the time. When I had looked afresh at tout ensemble the data, it was fair Thoreau had not travel into the wilderness. He go one land air mile from his kinsperson into the timberland at Walden Pond, deep chain reactor walk blank of the conduct he had constantly led. So it was a gesture. And his civil disobedience had been well rewritten, as it were, by Gandhi, and it had worked for Gandhi. I wasnt stressful to rib the dissimulation of Thoreaus myths, unless I power cut that Thoreau himself wasnt at both the Thoreau of figment which biographers and folklore had strengthened up. The biographers had both told the history of how Thoreau, in a ironic season, heat up some lean in a channelize tree trunk and readiness wake up to the bear woods. What I saw was that he had let to be hated by the townspeople, that he was a brooding narcist with more whole tone for trees and plants than for humans. I had asked myself the inquire: why did he sincerely at that s of his behavior cue a mile down the guidance to the bite of the syndicate? The solve was because he had scram in truth unpopular in the town. \nHow did you commence at your conclusions? I arrived at my conclusionsthey work been picked up since by othersby reading the psychological signs and signals of Thoreaus disposition and his actions. '