Each generation produces those who passionately speak out against injustices by their written words. Henry David Thoreau proved to be the voice of his people and thus changed history by expressing the ideals he believed to be correct, though the majority of the people did not always understand these ideals; "I should have told them at once that I was a transcendentalist. That would have been the shortest way of telling them that they would not understand my explanations" (Crawford 180). American Transcendentalism emerged in New England around 1836 and flourished for ten years until 1846. According to critics, American Transcendentalism was driven by the circumstances of nineteenth-century American life and is rooted in the American past. It owes its pervasive morality and the "doctrine of divine light" to such aspects of Puritanism and its concept of nature as a living mystery and not a clockwork universe which is fixed and permanent to the Romanticism age (Reuben 2).
             Thoreau as well as other Transcendentalists had an extraordinarily wide influence in American culture. In American religion, the movement ushered in a period of unprecedented debate and reform. Philosophically, it instilled the key ideas of American democracy and social reform. The American Transcendentalists are considered visionaries in their attitudes toward such issues as social protest, equality of the sexes, and labor reform. "We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds...A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men" (Emerson 5). Thoreau under Emerson's guidance issued this sort of challenge to all men, arguing for a new American culture, freed from European bondage and for the rebirth of an intellectual and artistic life that the society had previously lost. This renaissance was wha...