his new image.
Thoreau's contemporaries surely would have been. They knew Tho- reau as a troubled, terminally dyspeptic soul, a lifelong bachelor and curmudgeon. Robert Louis Stevenson dismissed him as a near-hermit devoid of sympathy for others; James Russell Lowell wrote that he was selfish andconceited.
Thoreau's rehabilitation in America began with the publication in 1931 of Henry Seidel Canby's Classic Americans, which hailed the Wal- den recluse as "an individualist citizen of the universe."...