Eschewing a conventional residence and lifestyle, Thoreau set up home in the woods on the shore of Walden Pond in Massachusetts, a mile from his nearest neighbor, and earned his living by labor of his own hands. Most people, he says are so occupied with the factitious care and toils of life that its finer fruits remain unplucked. So he went to Walden in an attempt to find, in the seemingly simple routines of life stripped to its essentials, the shape beneath what is apparently chaotic....

Nature was a form of religion for naturalist, essayist, and early environmentalist Henry David Thoreau (1817-62). In communing with the natural world, he wished to "live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and ... learn what it had to teach." Toward that end Thoreau built a cabin in the spring of 1845 on the shores of Walden Pond -- on land owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson -- outside Concord, Massachusetts. There he observed nature, farmed, built fences, surveyed, and wrote in his journal.
One product of his two-year sojourn was this book -- a great classic of American...

-Unquestionably the best book that has ever been written about Cape Cod, and it is the model to which all new books about the Cape are still compared.- -- Walter Harding, The Days of Henry Thoreau
The man whose name is synonymous with contemplative rural life took a series of beach-combing walking trips around Cape Code in the early 1850s. These trips to the Cape, Thoreau wrote, were intended to afford -a better view than I had yet had of the ocean.- The success of the great naturalist's expeditions lies in this compelling account of the region's plants, animals, topography,...

Volume two of the Journal includes Thoreau's extensive reminiscences of his 1839 excursion with his brother John along the Concord and Merrimack rivers and all his first impressions and observations entered in journals during the famous Walden sojourn. Collectively, these journals illustrate the middle stage of Thoreau's literary career--a stage noteworthy for his "devotion to the mastery of his craft" as evidenced by the progressive, intermingled drafts of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Walden, "Thomas Carlyle and His Works," "Wendell Phillips Before Concord...

Thoreau's Walden, ostensibly a simple account of a year spent alone in a cabin by a pond in the woods, is one of the most influential and complex books in American literature. After eight years in the writing, the first edition of 1854 was largely ignored, and it was not reprinted until 1862, the year of Thoreau's death. But by 1900 Walden was acclaimed by many as a classic, among the finest prose works of the century. It has been increasingly recognized as an important document of social criticism and dissent. It has been seen as a religious testament, with a kinship to...

The Maine Woods is a characteristically Thoreauvian book: a personal account of exploration, of exterior and interior discovery in a natural setting, conveyed in taut, workmanlike prose. Thoreau's evocative renderings of the life of the primitive forest--its mountains, waterways, fauna, flora, and inhabitants--are valuable in themselves. But his impassioned protest against despoilment in the name of commerce and sport, which even by the 1850s threatened to deprive Americans of the "tonic of wildness," makes The Maine Woods an especially vital book for our time. This...