Charles Stearns Wheeler (December 19, 1816 – June 13, 1843) was an American farmer and Transcendentalist pioneer.

He is known as being one of the inspirations for Walden, the book published by his friend Henry David Thoreau in 1854.

[1][2] While at Harvard, he was a founding member of the A.D. Club, then known as an honorary chapter of Alpha Delta Phi fraternity.

It was visited by Henry David Thoreau, his classmate at Concord and roommate at Harvard, who stayed there for much of the following summer, and was inspired to build his cabin at nearby Walden Pond.

[4][5] Charles Eliot Norton, a friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson and a Harvard classmate of Wheeler's, said of the duo's time at Flints Pond: "Wheeler introduced Thoreau to some of [nature's] intimacies to which he not then attained".