Stephen Allen Fender is Professor of American Studies and Director of the Graduate Research Centre in the Humanities, School of English and American Studies at the University of Sussex. His books include Plotting the Golden West: American Literature and the Rhetoric of the California Trail and Sea Changes: British Emigration and American Literature. Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1817 and is known for his extreme individualism, his preference for simple, austere living, and revolt against the demands of society and government. His other works are A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), Civil Disobedience (1849), Excursions, (1863) and The Maine Woods (1864).