The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail is a two-act play by Robert Edwin Lee and Jerome Lawrence written in 1970. Hal B. Wallis is producer of the film based on the play, for which both Lawrence and Lee wrote the screenplay. The play is based on the early life of the titular character, Henry David Thoreau, leading up to his night spent in a jail in Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau was jailed for refusing to pay a poll tax on the grounds that the money might be used to pay for the Mexican-American War, which he opposed.
Writing in the New York Times, Howard Taubman described the ideological relevance of the play to contemporary audiences, stating "this play and its protagonist, though they are of the 19th century, are speaking to today's concerns: an unwanted war in another land, civil disobedience, the interdependence of man and nature, education the role of government and the governed."
Read more about The Night Thoreau Spent In Jail: Plot, Characters, Production History
Famous quotes containing the words night, thoreau, spent and/or jail:
“Haven’t you heard, though,
About the ships where war has found them out
At sea, about the towns where war has come
Through opening clouds at night with droning speed
Further o’erhead than all but stars and angels
And children in the ships and in the towns?”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“The expressions of the poet cannot be analyzed; his sentence is one word, whose syllables are words. There are indeed no words quite worthy to be set to his music. But what matter if we do not hear the words always, if we hear the music?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918)
“Brother, you can’t go to jail for what you’re thinking,”
—Frank Loesser (1910–1969)