Henry David Thoreau has been called the patron saint of the environmental movement and the father of nonviolent resistance. He was a writer, a scientist, a seeker of truth, and a fighter for maintaining our nation’s first principles.
Thoreau’s best-known work, Walden, is considered a masterpiece and figures on every list of essential American books. His essay “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” has inspired activists and reformers from Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. to Colin Kaepernick and Greta Thunberg. Yet our knowledge of Henry David Thoreau is incomplete, outdated, and often inaccurate.
Ken Burns has produced a modern historical documentary about Henry David Thoreau in which the mythical Thoreau—the secluded hermit in the woods at Walden Pond, the outlier, the prophet—gives way to the human Thoreau: social; genial; inquisitive; an exacting scientist and charismatic speaker; an individual with flaws, self-contradictions, and misjudgments that prove his humanity and hold a mirror to our own.
Henry David Thoreau will be the first nationally broadcast biography of this American original at a time when his wisdom is sorely needed. Premiering Monday, March 30, 2026, on PBS, the three-part documentary will explore Thoreau’s most far-reaching and forward-thinking ideas: justice for all human beings, health of our planet and the species it sustains, quest for a meaningful life, importance of standing up for one’s beliefs in the public square. Tracing those concepts into the twenty-first century will demonstrate how ideas—when taken off the page and truly lived—can change the world.
The series explores Thoreau’s thoughts on people marginalized by society—Native peoples, African Americans, and women. His experiences with them, and how he wrote about them, reveal the complexities of race, gender, and the roots of inequality, offering a clearer view of our shared history. Combined with his reflections on the natural world, or “wildness,” his work shows how nature and the fight for justice are deeply connected.