Literature as Shelter: From Henry David Thoreau to Paul Auster.

This essay explores the literal and figurative construction of shelters in the works of Henry David Thoreau and Paul Auster. Their specific thoughts on nature, solitude, writing, inwardness and resistance prompt discussions on the necessity of finding shelters, whether physical or allegorical, in different contexts. After Thoreau's disobedience and imprisonment, after his solitary retreat and reflexive depiction of his self-constructed shelter at Walden Pond, which articulates both his individualism and his doubleness, Auster pictures the writer's physical body as the original locus of resistance. Ever since his first poems written in the context of the 1968 nonviolent sit-ins at Columbia, the writer's room has offered a refuge for a bustling solitude crowded with the voices of history and literature. In ten books of fiction and nonfiction that explicitly address Thoreau's heritage, Auster and his characters have gradually depicted literature itself as a non-place of inward refuge in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]