A Mind on Fire

HENRY DAVID THOREAU liked to compare himself to a rooster whose crowing wakes his neighbors, calling them back from sleep to an awareness of the present. “We cannot afford not to live in the present. He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past,” Thoreau wrote in his classic 1862 essay “Walking.” Robert D. Richardson, Thoreau’s biographer, embraced this sentiment and was himself such a rooster. Throughout his writing life, Richardson advocated for the sufficiency of the here and now over some imagined historical greatness lost in the mists of time—this even though, as one of the great literary biographers of his era, he was a connoisseur of the past.

A strange rooster, indeed.

Richardson, who died in June, was the author of intellectual biographies of not only Thoreau but also Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James. Taken together, wrote Irish novelist John Banville, these books represent “one of the greatest achievements in contemporary American literary studies.” Throughout his “New England trilogy,” Richardson sought to understand the life of his subjects primarily through their work. To do this, he identified the books that each of them had read during the course of their lives and methodically set about reading those works himself. Richardson’s larger subject was the “mind on fire”—the life of the mind as passion, delight, and