Born in Concord, Massachusetts, Thoreau was a friend of Emerson’s and similarly imbued with the ideas of New England transcendentalism. In Thoreau’s case it harmonized with a natural asceticism and high-mindedness. In spite of its pervasive contempt for what he called ‘the mass of mankind’, his most famous work, Walden (1854), is a continuing inspiration for back-to-nature movements. Thoreau suffered a day’s imprisonment for refusing to pay a poll tax, on the grounds that part of the tax went to the Mexican war promoting the expansion of Southern slavery. His record of this experience, the essay ‘Civil Disobedience’ (1849), became a model for later advocates of passive resistance, notably Mahatma Gandhi.