Henry David Thoreau

For two years, two months and two days Thoreau lived in a small house he built beside Walden Pond, about a mile and a half from his mother's kitchen — a fact his critics enjoy and which he never hid. The experiment was not a retreat from society but an argument with it: he wanted to find out how little a life actually requires, and to have the time that the difference buys. Walden, the book that came out of it, is part account-book and part sermon, and it has never stopped being read.

He also spent a night in the Concord jail rather than pay a poll tax to a government waging war on Mexico and holding people as property. The essay he wrote afterwards, Civil Disobedience, argued that a just person's place under an unjust government is prison. Gandhi read it in South Africa; Martin Luther King Jr. read it as a student and later said it convinced him that non-cooperation with evil is a moral duty. Thoreau died of tuberculosis at forty-four. Asked whether he had made his peace with God, he is said to have replied that they had never quarrelled.