Walden and Other Writings by Henry David Thoreau
Why I Recommend This Book…
Henry David Thoreau is the giant of American nature writing.
Born in 1817 in Concord Massachusetts, his father held many jobs, and his family often experienced financial difficulties, still Thoreau won admission to Harvard.
Back in Concord, he formed a close relationship with Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Transcendentalists, such as Margaret Fuller and Bronson Alcott, father of Louisa May Alcott.
He also worked in his father’s pencil business, where he filled his journal with millions of words, which later became his literary works. He also worked as a teacher at Concord Academy and regularly published poems and essays in The Dial, as well as working in Emerson’s household as a handyman. (You may be interested in reading my review of Amy Belding Brown’s Mr. Emerson’s Wife, a creative examination of the “rumored” relationship between Thoreau and Mr. Emerson’s wife, Lidian).
In 1845 Thoreau built a cabin on Emerson’s property, beside Walden Pond, staying for two years, stating his purpose was to “transact some private business with the fewest obstacles.”
This book not only contains his masterpiece, Walden, in its entirety, but all of his significant works.
Thoreau visited Cape Cod seventy years before Henry Beston, claiming he did so because he wished “to get a better view than I had yet had of the ocean” and he wrote four essays about his time on the Cape: “The Shipwreck” “The Wellfleet Oysterman” “The Highland Light” and “Provincetown.”
In “The Shipwreck” Thoreau recalls that in order to get the best possible view a trip on a steamer, heading east, outside the “forearm” of the Cape, was required. But once he arrived in Boston, the steamer had not yet arrived, due to a violent storm, which had caused another ship, the St. John, en-route from Galway, Ireland, to wreck.
The experience of witnessing first-hand the aftermath of this accident profoundly affected Thoreau, and he wrote about the dead with their “marbled feet and matted heads” and “wide-open and staring eyes, yet lusterless.”
In addition to Walden and his essays written about the Cape, this edition includes Thoreau’s other travel writings, including “The Maine Woods” “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers” “Walking” and “Civil Disobedience.”
