Many people know Henry David Thoreau as the author of Walden and “Civil Disobedience.” Fewer know his groundbreaking work as a founder of environmentalism or for his inspiration for nonviolence movements. Fewer still are aware of his work as a geologist, botanist, pencil-production inventor, poet, and early adopter of Darwinian theory—and these roles don’t even begin to capture the many-faceted nature of Thoreau’s life and work or his impact on American history and thought.

After the Revolutionary War and the founding of the United States, there was much discussion about what sort of citizen would emerge in a monarch-free democracy. Scholar Randall Fuller strips Thoreau of the mythos surrounding him to present him as a human being actively engaged in the America of his time, an artist and scientist who in many ways embodied the promise of a “new” citizen in the early Republic.

Fuller is the Herman Melville distinguished professor of 19th-century American literature at the University of Kansas.

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