Bradley P. Dean, 51; Turned Thoreau Notes Into Published Works

Bradley P. Dean, 51, a scholar who helped turn hundreds of pages of Henry David Thoreau’s handwritten notes into a widely praised book, died of a heart attack Jan. 14 at his home in Bloomington, Ind., announced Indiana University, where Dean was a researcher in the English department.

Dean’s decoding of Thoreau’s virtually illegible notes resulted in “Wild Fruits: Thoreau’s Rediscovered Last Manuscript” (2000). He also helped get Thoreau’s “Faith in a Seed” (1996) and “Letters to a Spiritual Seeker” (2004) published. At the time of his death, Dean was working on Thoreau’s unpublished “Indian Notebooks,” which examined Native American life.

“Thoreau has become a much bigger subject in the history of science” in part because of Dean’s work, Robert D. Richardson, a Thoreau biographer, told the Boston Globe.

At the Thoreau Institute in Lincoln, Mass., Dean was director of the media center from 1998 to 2005.

Born into a military family stationed in the Philippines, Dean became a Navy mechanic and managed motor inns before earning a doctorate in English from the University of Connecticut in 1993.