Many authors and poets including Leo Tolstoy, Willa Cather, and William Butler Yeats have sung his praises and believed that, like Emerson, The country knows not yet, or in the least part, how great a son it has lost.Henry David Thoreau was born at what is now the Thoreau Farm Trust in Concord, Massachusetts on 12 July 1817 to Cynthia (1787-1872) and John Thoreau (1787-1859), pencil maker.