"Reviews and Posthumous Assessments" for this edition collects eight new reviews of Thoreau's antislavery and late environmental essays as well as ofWalden. To the influential portraits of Thoreau by Ralph Waldo Emerson and James Russell Lowell, the Third Edition adds John Burroughs's "Another Word on Thoreau," his response to them and to his great predecessor. "Recent Criticism" includes eighteen selections of the best historical, political, philosophical, poststructuralist, and environmental criticism of Thoreau's writing since the mid-twentieth century. To classic pieces by E. B....

Thoreau's political writing is intensely personal and direct. Both his life and work focus uncompromisingly on the question "how should I live?." This edition of Thoreau's political essays includes "Civil Disobedience," selections from Walden, and the anti-slavery addresses. In her introduction, Nancy L. Rosenblum places the essays in the context of Thoreau's life of self-examination, and analyzes the themes of citizenship and resistance that have made Thoreau an enduring influence in political philosophy and practice.

Together in one volume, Emerson's Nature and Thoreau's Walking, is writing that defines our distinctly American relationship to nature.

"In wildness is the preservation of the world," -- A lecture by Thoreau which became one of the seminal works of the early environmental movement.

Thoreau wrote his famous essay, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, as a protest against an unjust but popular war and the immoral but popular institution of slave-owning. He did more than write-he declined to pay his taxes, and was hauled off to gaol in consequence. Who can say how much this refusal of his hastened the end of the war and of slavery ? At the present day, intellectual detachment from the State, and individual defiance of its behests when these are opposed to conscience, are more difficult, and apparently more futile, than in Thoreau's time. The unit seems of less im-portance in...

Excursions contains the complete texts of nine of Thoreaus most popular essays. These include Natural History of Massachusetts, his first essay to appear in The Dial (a quarterly periodical edited by Margaret Fuller), as well as other well known early works like A Winter Walk and The Landlord. Later works include his famous essays Walking, Autumnal Tints and Wild Apples, the last of which was based on a lecture he gave during the Concord Lyceums 1859-1860 season and was published in the Atlantic Monthly after his death. *** Because Excursions is a chronological presentation of Thoreaus work,...

On the Duty of Civil Disobedience is one of Thoreau's most famous essays. This edition includes a special section for the reader to take notes at the end of the book.

Part of the Classics Retold to be Read, Not just Revered series, this retelling of the first two chapters of "Walden" has been undertaken to make the book more widely accessible--without diluting its intellectual content.