"He is a singular character--a young man with much of wild original nature still remaining in him; and so far as he is sophisticated, it is in a way and method of his own. He is as ugly as sin, long-nosed, queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and somewhat rustic, although courteous manners, corresponding very well with such an exterior"--so Nathaniel Hawthorne described Henry David Thoreau after their first meeting, an inauspicious beginning to their friendship and a subtle understatement of Thoreau's stoic image. Generally unrecognized by his contemporaries and often dismissed as "little more than a second-rate imitator" of the more celebrated Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau emerged during the twentieth century to secure a permanent position in American literature as well as modern thought. His influence has been universally acknowledged and his message embraced by young and old alike, by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., Frank...