Concord Welcomes The 81st Annual Gathering of The Thoreau Society
T BY MICHAEL FREDERICK
The Thoreau Society was founded in 1941 to stimulate interest in and foster education about Thoreau’s life, works, and legacy and his place in his world and ours; to encourage research on Thoreau’s life and writings; to act as a repository for Thoreauviana and material relevant to Thoreau; and to advocate for the preservation of Thoreau Country. The Annual Gathering is an opportunity to come together and share knowledge, recognize accomplishments, and challenge ourselves to live more deliberately. This year’s Gathering will welcome more than 90 presenters speaking on a variety of topics from “The International Thoreau” to “Thoreau and the Poetry of Life.” Guided tours of Walden Pond, the Concord Museum, and the Special Collections of Concord Free Public Library will take attendees behind the scenes. Here are just a few of the exciting events planned for this year’s Gathering.
Rebecca Solnit
Rebecca Solnit, Thoreau Society Medal Honoree “Thoreau: The Politics of Nature and the Nature of Politics” 7:30 - 8:30 pm, July 7, at Masonic Lodge, 58 Monument Square It is a great privilege to honor Rebecca Solnit and Lawrence Buell with the Thoreau Society Medal, the Society’s highest honor, which recognizes “sustained, essential contributions to the legacy and vitality of Thoreauvian studies and ideals through extraordinary scholarship or service.” Solnit is being honored for her urgent and deeply compelling writings about Thoreau and for the manifold ways that her body of work, in general, translates Thoreau’s legacy and commitments into
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new and necessary contexts. Solnit is the author of more than twenty books and has served as a columnist for Harper’s, the Guardian, and other venues. Her writings range widely from environmental, technological, and aesthetic histories to meditations on politics and praxis (with emphases on environmental justice, gender, native sovereignty, and civil disobedience) to memoir. Lawrence Buell, Thoreau Society Medal Honoree Picnic Honoring Lawrence Buell 12:00 – 2:00 pm, July 10, Thoreau Farm, 341 Virginia Road Lawrence Buell is being honored for his distinguished career and body of work devoted to the writings of the New England Transcendentalists, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, and the American Renaissance. Buell’s works include Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the United States and Beyond (2001), Emerson (2003), and The Future of Environmental Criticism (2005). He is co-editor, with Wai Chee Dimock, of Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature (2007). In 2008, he delivered the Dana S. Brigham Memorial Keynote Address, “The Individual and the State: The Politics of Thoreau in Our Time,” during the Annual Gathering. He serves on the Thoreau Farm Trust Advisory Board. Screening and Film Discussion of Margaret Fuller: Transatlantic Revolutionary 4:00 – 6:00 pm, July 8, at The Umbrella Arts Center, 40 Stow Street When Margaret Fuller died tragically in the wreck of the Elizabeth off Fire
