Chronology
1837: Thoreau graduates from Harvard at twenty, comes home to Concord, and looks for a career. Probably begins a journal.
1838: Gives his first lecture before the Concord Lyceum, thus initiating a practice that was to have an important effect on his writing.
1839: With his brother John, embarks on a fluvial excursion along the Concord and Merrimack, and gather material for The Week.
1840 Makes his bow as a poet: the Transcendentalist Dial prints his lyric about Edmund Sewall.
1841 As handyman and friend, takes up residence with the Emersons. Is attracted to Linda Emerson.
1842 Publishes in eh Dial which carries nine of his best poems and his essay Natural History of Massachusetts
1843 Leaves Emersons home to act as a tutor to Emersons nephew at Staten Island and to try his luck with the New York literary market. More publications of essays and poems.
1845: Goes to live in a hut beside Walden Pond. Commences his period of greatest literary productivity.
1846 Travels to Main; gathers some of the material later to go into The Maine Woods.
1847. Ends Walden experiment; resumes residence at Emerson home.
1849: Thoreaus first book, the Week, and most influential essay, Civil Disobedience, published.
1854 Walden or Life in the Woods published.
1857 Fight over slavery intensifies; Thoreau meets John Brown and is deeply impressed by him.
1860 More essays, including two on Brown are printed.
1862 Dies of tuberculosis on spring.

Where I lived.
By surveying, carpentry, and day-labor of various other kinds in the village in the meanwhile, for I have as many trades as fingers, I had earned $13.34. The expense of food for eight months, namely, from July 4th to March 1st, the time when these estimates were made though I lived there more than two yearsnot counting potatoes, a little green corn, and some peas, which I had raised, nor considering the