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Thoreau’s literary classic, an elegantly written record of his experiment in simple living, has engaged readers and thinkers for a century and a half. This edition of Walden is the first to set forth an authoritative text with generous annotations. Thoreau scholar Jeffrey S. Cramer has meticulously corrected errors and omissions from previous editions of Walden and here provides illuminating notes on the biographical, historical, and geographical contexts of Thoreau’s life.
Cramer’s newly edited text is based on the original 1854 edition of Walden, with emendations taken from Thoreau’s draft manuscripts, his own markings on the page proofs, and notes in his personal copy of the book. In the editor’s notes to the volume, Cramer quotes from sources Thoreau actually read, showing how he used, interpreted, and altered these sources. Cramer also glosses Walden with references to Thoreau’s essays, journals, and correspondence. With the wealth of material in this edition, readers will find an unprecedented opportunity to immerse themselves in the unique and fascinating world of Thoreau. Anyone who has read and loved Walden will want to own and treasure this gift edition. Those wishing to read Walden for the first time will not find a better guide than Jeffrey S. Cramer.
Thoreau began his studies at Harvard College in 1833. His years at Harvard were stimulating, if solitary; he immersed himself in a traditional humanities curriculum of multiple languages, anatomy, history, and geography. Upon graduation in 1837, he began teaching in Concord at the Center School, the public school he'd attended as a boy, but left his post after being told to administer corporal punishment to a student. During these years following college Thoreau published his first essay and poem, began lecturing at the Concord Lyceum, and attended Transcendentalist discussions at the home of his mentor, the renowned essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. At Emerson's urging, Thoreau started a journal -- a project that would become his lifelong passion and culminate in more than two million words.
A boat trip with his brother, John, in 1839 set the foundation for his well known work A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Sadly, unforeseen tragedy separated the tightly knit brothers in 1842, when John died of lockjaw caused by a razor cut. The following year, Thoreau joined Emerson in editing the Transcendental periodical The Dial, a publication to which Thoreau would become a prolific contributor. He also pulled up stakes for a time, accepting a position to tutor Emerson's children in Staten Island, New York. Half a year later, Thoreau returned to his family's house in Concord, deeply affected by the abolitionists he had met in Manhattan. He dedicated much of his time to lectures and essays advocating abolition and became involved in sheltering runaway slaves on their journey north.
In 1846 Thoreau was briefly imprisoned for refusing to pay a poll tax to the village of Concord, in protest against the government's support of slavery, as well as its war of expansion with Mexico. His experience in the Concord jail led to the writing of what would later be titled "Civil Disobedience." Unappreciated in Thoreau's lifetime, "Civil Disobedience" is now considered one of the country's seminal political works.
During this period, Thoreau built his cabin on Walden Pond and lived there for a little more than two years. In this small home on Emerson's property, he began writing his most enduring work, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, and finished the manuscript for A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Sales were exceedingly poor, with Thoreau eventually acquiring 706 unsold copies of the original 1000 copy print run. Thoreau quipped, "I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself." When Walden was published in 1854, sales were brisk and its reception favorable, although Thoreau's work as a whole remained somewhat obscure during his lifetime.
By the time Walden was published, Thoreau had turned from the largely symbolic approach to nature that he had learned from Emerson and other Romantic writers to a much more empirical approach, more in keeping with new scientific methods. His observations of nature throughout the 1850s, largely recorded in his journals, have come to be regarded as a model of ecological attentiveness, even though the term "ecology" was not coined until 1866. He developed several talks on the natural history of the Concord region, and even set to work on a series of longer, book-length manuscripts. Two of these, one on the dispersal of tree seeds and the other on the region's many wild fruits, were not published until 1993 and 2000 respectively. Today, Thoreau's writing is valued for both the poetic imagination and the scientific methodology it displays.
As the years passed, Thoreau's commitment to the antislavery movement strengthened, as did his popularity as a lecturer and essayist. Even in the declining health of his later years, he remained a man of conviction and action, writing on many subjects and participating in various political causes until shortly before his death from tuberculosis. George Eliot's review of Walden singles out qualities that attract readers to this day: "a deep poetic sensibility" and "a refined as well as a hardy mind." Henry David Thoreau died on May 6, 1862, in Concord.
Author biography from the Barnes & Noble Classics edition of Walden.
Both of his elder brothers were schoolteachers who helped to pay Thoreau's way through Harvard (about $179 a year in 1837).
Most biographers remain undecided about Thoreau's sexuality. He never married, although he proposed to friend Ellen Sewall in 1840 (she rejected his offer). Some believe he was a "repressed" homosexual, and others that he was asexual and wholly celibate.
Thoreau's grave is located in the Sleepy Hollow cemetery at Concord, Massachusetts, beside those of fellow literary legends Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.
I should not obtrude my affairs so much on the notice of my readers if very particular inquiries had not been made by my townsmen concerning my mode of life, which some would call impertinent, though they do not appear to me at all impertinent, but, considering the circumstances, very natural and pertinent. Some have asked what I got to eat; if I did not feel lonesome; if I was not afraid; and the like. Others have been curious to learn what portion of my income I devoted to charitable purposes; and some, who have large families, how many poor children I maintained. I will therefore ask those of my readers who feel no particular interest in me to pardon me if I undertake to answer some of these questions in this book. In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. Unfortunately, I am confined to this theme by the narrowness of my experience. Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men's lives; some such account as he would send to his kindred from a distant land; for if he has lived sincerely, it must have been in a distant land to me. Perhaps these pages are more particularly addressed to poor students. As for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them. I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits.
I would fain say something, not so much concerning the Chinese and Sandwich Islanders as you who read these pages, who are said to live in New England; something about your condition, especially your outward condition or circumstances in this world, in this town, what it is, whether it is necessary that it be as bad as it is, whether it cannot be improved as well as not. I have travelled a good deal in Concord; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways. What I have heard of Bramins sitting exposed to four fires and looking in the face of the sun; or hanging suspended, with their heads downward, over flames; or looking at the heavens over their shoulders "until it becomes impossible for them to resume their natural position, while from the twist of the neck nothing but liquids can pass into the stomach"; or dwelling, chained for life, at the foot of a tree; or measuring with their bodies, like caterpillars, the breadth of vast empires; or standing on one leg on the tops of pillarseven these forms of conscious penance are hardly more incredible and astonishing than the scenes which I daily witness. The twelve labors of Hercules were trifling in comparison with those which my neighbors have undertaken; for they were only twelve, and had an end; but I could never see that these men slew or captured any monster or finished any labor. They have no friend Iolaus to burn with a hot iron the root of the hydra's head, but as soon as one head is crushed, two spring up.
I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born? They have got to live a man's life, pushing all these things before them, and get on as well as they can. How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and woodlot! The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.
But men labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon plowed into the soil for compost. By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal. It is a fool's life, as they will find when they get to the end of it, if not before.
Continues...
Excerpted from Walden by Henry David Thoreau Copyright © 1987 by Henry David Thoreau. Excerpted by permission.
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| Economy | 1 | |
| Where I lived, and what I lived for | 78 | |
| Reading | 97 | |
| Sounds | 108 | |
| Solitude | 125 | |
| Visitors | 135 | |
| The bean-field | 150 | |
| The village | 162 | |
| The ponds | 168 | |
| Baker farm | 194 | |
| Higher laws | 202 | |
| Brute neighbors | 214 | |
| House-warming | 228 | |
| Former inhabitants; and winter visitors | 246 | |
| Winter animals | 262 | |
| The pond in winter | 273 | |
| Spring | 289 |
Anonymous
Posted March 25, 2003
When I read Thoreau¿s book Walden, I was amazed to learn that Thoreau¿s writing had such a great influence on such men as Mohandas Gandhi and Dr Martin Luther King. They Read Thoreau¿s book on Civil Disobedience, which advocated Passive resistance. (Peaceful protest). Another thing that surprised me was the way that Emerson and James Russell Lowell degraded Thoreau in their speeches at Henry¿s memorial service upon his death. During the memorial these two so-called friends of Thoreau called him a lazy braggart, a societies maverick & A drop out! Perhaps by societies standards he was a rebel but certainly not the worthless ne¿er do well that these men painted him. Thoreau sets out to build a cabin on Walden Pond in order to be at one with nature. Thoreau was at heart a naturalist. He resisted paying a tax which he spent one night in the Concord Jail. This was to prove a point. He lived at Walden Pond for 2 years. Upon returning to society, he continued to write his books. He said that, ¿most men lead lives of quiet desperation.¿ Henry David Thoreau was born July 12, 1817 And died May 6,1862 of T.B. He built his cabin on March 1845 at Walden Pond at a cost of $28,12 & half cents. Thoreau started out life in the Transcendentalist movement but He later departed from this group. He was a genius that was unappreciated in his day.
18 out of 21 people found this review helpful.
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Posted January 5, 2010
I recently had the pleasure of reading this fine book authored by Henry David Thoreau. This book has garnered a fair bit of controversy among those who have read it. Its a love it or hate it sort of book, and one must have an open mind truly appreciate the book. Inclosed in Walden, is the author's deep personal thoughts and beliefs, with his own unique brand of philosophy. Thoreau has a one of a kind writing style I have never seen outside of his own work. For his time, he probably would have been described as edgy, and without bounds. Enough of my own subjective opinion, lets take an analytical look at this interesting piece of American literature.
In the first chapter in this book, our author in detail, describes his intentions to build a cabin and live off the land of Walden Pond. This was not in any way a new concept, as much of America lived in this rural way, but what sets Thoreau apart is he documented and wrote about his experience. Henry Thoreau believed he was making an attempt at achieving a purer form of lifestyle. Also included in this first chapter is the exact cost the author payed to appropriate his desired lifestyle in the form of the price of the materials paid to construct his dwelling, and precise accounts of price paid for the modest amount of food Thoreau purchased on his occasional visits into town.
Often throughout the book, Henry Thoreau will enclose his own thoughts on certain topics. In on section, he reminisces on a time he spent in jail for a refusal to pay a state tax. This is just the sort of rebellion Thoreau would approve of. He held the view that the "savage" (as indians were apparently called during that time), lived a purer and less corrupt form of lifestyle. This opinion was formed by the reflection of the average man's life at the time. A man would work to afford a home, work to afford and buy all of these things that the author though to be unnecessary or too luxurious than needed. A "savage" simply made what he needed, he would never become a "slave" to any type of property owner or tax man.
Henry David Thoreau had a unique and one of a kind form of philosophy. One finds it difficult to approximately and descisivly label his beliefs. Our author believed that each person should live by their own means, and their own way. Rejection of society norms was not necessarily a give-in to his school of thought, so long as those norms suited that individual. It is quite easy to dismiss Henry Thoreau as an antisocial misfit, but there is evidence in the book that he made frequent trips into town, and mentioned elsewhere he would have visitors at his home, and would seek to visit others. So this kind of belief form could really be best described as "to each his own", and to do only what you believe in and want to do. Lastly, self-sufficiency was stressed greatly, and is a great proponent to this way of thinking, as one who acts alone needs to be able to provide for themselves.
Overall this was a very interesting book to read, and brings many things into questioning. It is a thinking person's book, and I enjoyed it greatly. Few authors have such a notoriety to just one book, and next to Civil Disobedience, it is his most famous work. All outdoor enthusiasts, fans of old literature, anarchists, and people with an offbeat point of view, will likely greatly appreciate and enjoy this great book by a man remembered mainly only for his be
10 out of 12 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.This book is very poorly converted to e-book and contains too many errors to make it enjoyable to read; in some places it is impossible to read because you just can't tell what you are supposed to be reading.
7 out of 10 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted August 18, 2001
On Easter of 2000 I visited Concord, Massachusetts, and purchased this volume in a gift shop just across Rt. 62 from the site of Henry¿s cabin. It had been raining the entire trip, but armed with my coat of many pockets, my backpack, and my umbrella, I entered and ¿sauntered¿ about the gift shop, glad to get out of the cold dampness if only for a moment. I picked up a couple of the customary t-shirts one needs as souvenirs when traveling and then found myself in the book section, drawn to the items which enthrall me wherever I go. One book stood out¿not because I needed it, for I had a copy at home that was given to me by a friend for my birthday one year, but because of the photo on the cover. Whoever had designed the cover had actually BEEN to Walden, and the proof was the wet leaf among the terra firma known as the Pond. With an accompanying introduction by Joyce Carol Oates, I couldn¿t refuse. The cover still touches me, but I have taken to reading books and giving them away afterward, a habit that I am almost sure that Henry would love. I instead remember Walden in other ways, as rain falling on cedars. Walden to me is always Easter, always Earth Day, always truth, and most of all, always a reminder that my life is not mean or poor but rich and ready for picking. The chapters relying on Spring, Economy, Reading, and most of all the swelling Conclusion, like a gentle coda after the soaring symphony, remind me of what still waits, regardless of how old I am, and how old I will get.
5 out of 6 people found this review helpful.
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Posted January 29, 2012
There are several scan/ typing errors in this edition
2 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
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Posted December 26, 2011
This is a great book. However, this version presents as a lackluster scan-job with no editing yielding a finished product contaminated by numerous unintelligible conversion errors from smeared paragraphs to numerous misconverted words. I should note that I have not read this version in full as I was too dissatisfied with the poor quality to proceed much beyond the first forty pages (which I had previously read and was mostly scanning for errors in an attempt to find a legible nook version of this great book).
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted October 11, 2011
"Walden" is one of the greatest and most important books in American literature, but this version is almost illegible on the Nook. Spend a couple more bucks and get another version.
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted August 9, 2011
Walden is wonderful piece of literature. This copy contains a lot of unreadable text. Much of the text is ra dom characters and mumbo jumbo! Waste of money!
2 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
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Posted May 10, 2011
Was not scanned well.
2 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
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Posted August 3, 2010
Walden was written as a backlash against consumerism and conformity. Thoreau built his own house with affordable and left over materials and sustained himself for a very small amount of money. The philosophy that he offers is one that many of us could benefit in listening to. Do we really need the most expensive cell phone on the market, or will the free model do? Do we really need a designer bag? Does it make us any happier to buy a house that is so elaborate it will add ten more years before we can retire?
Walden questions what is truly important in life and what things are unnecessary burdens that we allow society to place on us.
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted June 26, 2012
Not my style.
1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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Posted January 5, 2012
Of all the books and treatises that have ever been published since our country's founding, this one stands heads and shoulders above everything else. In this volume, Thoreau beautifully articulates all that is great about America ... not its guns and armies, but rather its trees and forests, the quite meditations possible in unspoilt nature, and the philosophy of self reliance.
This is, as far as I am concerned, THE best American book EVER written, and is absolutely essential reading for anyone who wants to know about America.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted May 24, 2011
The first few pages are okay, but later ones contain whole paragraphs that are indecipherable jumbles of symbols, punctuation marks, and random letters. Walden is a good book, too bad this one is unreadable.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted February 26, 2011
I bought thid book and it took forever to download so i didnt get a chance to read it--too bad, maybe I will try again another time
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted February 29, 2000
This book manages to pass on more wisdom and inspiration then any other work I can think of. It will convict you into living life, it will cause you to see the world as a place of wonder and oppotunity. Only to be read with an open mind.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Posted January 5, 2013
Thus free version is so loaded with jumbled text an errors, it is difficult to tead. Where is the quality control Barnes and Noble???
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Posted October 9, 2012
Did you know he was enviermentallsist
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Posted March 11, 2012
The version has a few glitches...after I bought it there was no picture, also the top of the page doesn't recognise the title. I haven't found any other errors to this book yet but I'm dissapointed becse it is such a good book
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Posted January 15, 2012
Read this in english. Sadly most of the kids my age dont appreicate this type of thinking and my lust for conseveration of my own mind
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Posted January 5, 2012
This is the best American classic edition of Henry David Throeau's classic text. A true joy to read. Highly recommended for all ages.
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Overview
Thoreau’s literary classic, an elegantly written record of his experiment in simple living, has engaged readers and thinkers for a century and a half. This edition of Walden is the first to set forth an authoritative text with generous annotations. Thoreau scholar Jeffrey S. Cramer has meticulously corrected errors and omissions from previous editions of Walden and here provides illuminating notes ...