“The life of Thoreau straddles the era that witnessed the birth of our modern, market- based, urban culture. A singular figure and writer, even amongst the Transcendentalists, whose impulses he shared. He was also, to borrow his mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson’s term, a “representative man.” Though he remains the towering figure in the history of nature writing, he symbolizes the way in which nature became for a certain class and subset of Americans—hipsters, bohemians, artists—and other. A creature of New England village life, Thoreau’s life was interspersed with what even he would consider wilderness excursions. Notably, he went to Maine, and he went there to find a landscape that would take him beyond ordinary, 'civilized' experience. The landscape was raw, and it had much to teach him. 'Nature was here something savage and awful though beautiful,' he wrote.“

– Adam Tuchinsky, Dean of the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at USM

Learn more about this exhibition.