I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements. You may safely say, A penny for your thoughts, or a thousand pounds. When sometimes I am reminded that the mechanics and shopkeepers stay in their shops not only all the forenoon, but all the afternoon too, sitting with crossed legs, so many of them—as if the legs were made to sit upon, and not to stand or walk upon—I think that they deserve some credit for not having all committed suicide long ago.

So wrote Henry David Thoreau, dismissively and perhaps even a touch condescendingly, in his famed essay “Walking.” He was no stranger to working for a living: he had tried his hand at making and selling pencils, and often added to his signature the sobriquet “civil engineer.” Not that he was a master at business, for he also had a staggering pile of unsold copies of his book Walden taking up a big chunk of his celebrated cabin at Walden Pond, Massachusetts. It would be decades after his death 150 years ago—on, to be precise, May 6, 1862—before Walden would come to be appreciated as the classic of American literature that it is, and although it is in print in many editions today, poor Henry David never earned a cent in royalties from the book.

Walden is, of course, a bible among believers in self-sufficiency: stalwarts of the back-to-the-land movement back in the 1960s and ’70s, the urban homesteaders and new pioneers of today. There’s some small irony hidden in that, since Thoreau was a regular at the table of his Concord neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose generosity he repaid by sometimes scandalizing the women of the house with his talk of the sexual habits of various animals. (We lack fly-on-the-wall details.) But Emerson participated in the conversation, too, as did the eminent naturalist Louis Agassiz, so Thoreau wasn’t shown the door, and week after the week he was back for more food, wine, and conversation.

We have a picture of Thoreau as a hermit in the deep woods, but he lived just a mile from Emerson’s home in town, within hearing of Concord’s church bells. He also lived within close proximity of his mother, who did his laundry for him—in exchange, lest this seem a one-sided favor, for handyman jobs around Mrs. Thoreau’s Main Street home. He did odd jobs for other people in Concord as well, often in exchange for meals, and he set a good table himself, once, it’s said, hosting a supper party for twenty-five people in his small one-room cabin.

Thoreau’s notion of self-sufficiency did not involve standoffishness, then, and it made ample room for conviviality and company. Let’s not incorrectly remember him, on this anniversary, as a loner, but instead as an ardent student of simplicity, pleasure, and the best of the good life, dinner and drinks included.