" 27 " ~

Forever 27 Club

Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse

'Now he's gone and joined that stupid club. I told him not to join that stupid club.'
Wendy O' Connor
Kurt Cobain's mother *

________________________

"Not a castaway or a waif, not a raftsman or a whale fisherman, Thoreau (1817-1862)

was a Harvard graduate, the son of a mildly successful pencil manufacturer

in Concord, Massachusetts, who, after floundering a bit, at the age of

twenty-seven"

27

 "built himself a ten-by-fifteen foot cabin of pine logs and

secondhand boards beside Walden Pond and lived there alone

for twenty-six months, raising much of his own food. 

This was not then a cliche, though twentieth-century back-to-the-landers 

have sometimes threatened to make it so.

Like George Orwell, the great English essayist, a hundred years later—

an Eton boy who chose an urban form of self-denial while

"down and out in Paris and London"— Thoreau was seeking

special insight from a stripped-down existence. Both men were radicals,

but Thoreau was after rapture, not social realism. Both were essayists

but Thoreau in his rash and roosterly optimism is quintessentially

American."

EDWARD HOAGLAND About H.D. Thoreau (1991)

* 27, 
A history of the 27 club
by Howard Sounes
Da Capo, 2014