Founded in 1941, The Thoreau SocietyTM is the oldest and largest organization devoted to an American author.

Join Thoreauvians globally, become a Thoreau Society member.
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The 2021 Henry David Thoreau Prize for Literary Excellence in Nature Writing

goes to Robin Wall Kimmerer, who is the Thoreau Society's featured speaker during the Concord Festival of Authors.

Kimmerer will be speaking at the First Parish, 20 Lexington Rd, Concord, MA 01742, on October 29 at 8 PM. Ticket to go on sale soon.

Get Tickets

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Watch previous Thoreau Prize Winner
George Schaller and special guest Jane Goodall.

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The struggle for social and environmental justice

Henry David Thoreau saw the exploitation of people and of nature as two sides of the same coin of injustice and oppression. In his own day, he decried an economic and political system that countenanced human bondage even as it despoiled nature. As he asks in “Slavery in Massachusetts,” “[W]hat signifies the beauty of nature when men are base?”

The Thoreau Society continues our namesake’s struggle to open all eyes to social and environmental injustice, and to end blindness to the consequences of unchecked racism, climate change, and other threats to individual freedom, democratic equality, and social justice in the United States and around the world. As a community devoted to Thoreau’s legacy, we are a work-in-progress, committed to the perpetual challenge of improving the Thoreau Society as an embodiment—and a promoter—of these ideals.

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