Description
In 1839, Thoreau and his brother took a small boat upriver and back. Some years later, while in his cabin at Walden Pond, he gathered his notes from that journey and other writings from his journals, and composed this, his first book.
Like the rivers it describes, the book meanders through varying territories and climates. He writes of the natural surroundings they encounter and of the history of the region, but also takes long and remarkable detours through topics like friendship, history, a comparison of Christianity and Hinduism, Vedic literature, government and conscience, Thoreau’s philosophy of literature, monuments and graveyards, poetry (in particular Ossian, Chaucer, and certain minor Greek poets), and the satires of Aulus Persius Flaccus. Thoreau also includes several poems of his own.
Thoreau had the first edition of this book published at his own expense, and at first it struggled to find an audience. “I have now a library of nearly 900 volumes,” he remarked at one point, “over 700 of which I wrote myself.”
Description
Walden is one of the more famous transcendentalist tracts in modern American literature. First published in 1854, Walden is an account of Thoreau’s famous experiment in solitude: spending over two years alone in a cabin near the wilderness.
Walden is broken into sections that meditate on single themes: economy, reading, sounds, solitude, visitors, and so on. The style is complex, weaving back and forth between simple, home-spun prose and complex allegory, metaphor, and allusion. This makes Walden an interesting read because while it may seem accessible on the surface, it’s a book that requires deep and repeated reading to fully appreciate its many complexities.
Description
Though perhaps most famous for Walden, Henry David Thoreau was also a prolific essayist. Many of his essays touch on subjects similar to his famous book: long walks through nature, things found in moonlight that are invisible and unheard during the day, his preference for wild apples over domestic ones. In many ways he prefigured environmentalism, expressing his love for untouched nature and lamenting what the encroachment of man and cities were doing to it.
He also had strong opinions on many other subjects. One of his most famous essays, “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,” was written as a result of his going to jail for refusing to pay several years’ worth of poll taxes. One of the primary reasons for his refusal was his holding the government in contempt for its support of slavery, and several of his other essays express support and admiration for John Brown, who thought to start a slave revolt when he attacked Harper’s Ferry in 1859.
Whether discussing trees in a forest, slavery, or the works of Thomas Carlyle, Thoreau’s essays are deeply personal and full of keen observations, often in poetic language. They give a sense of the man expressing them as being much more than the views being expressed.