On Henry David Thoreau of Concord, Mass.—Laura Dassow Walls, Notre Dame

The idea behind this show is pretty simple: A university campus is a destination for all kinds of interesting people, so why not invite some of these folks out to brunch, where we’ll have an informal conversation about their work, and then we’ll turn those brunches into a podcast?

It’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it.

Here in the show's season one finale, Laura Dassow Walls, William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English at Notre Dame, discusses her book Henry David Thoreau: A Life, which was published in 2017 by The University of Chicago Press and earlier this year won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for biography. In the course of their conversation, Laura and host Ted Fox explore the many sides of Thoreau: writer, abolitionist, leader in the Transcendental religious movement, and so on. Just as importantly, though, it becomes clear there is one thing that he was not: the Walden Pond hermit of our imaginations.