Walden by Henry David Thoreau (Full Version)

by Henry David Thoreau

Overview

Walden (also known as Life in the Woods) by Henry David Thoreau is one of the best-known non-fiction books written by an American. Published in 1854, it details Thoreau's life for two years and two months in second-growth forest around the shores of Walden Pond, not far from his friends and family in Concord, Massachusetts. Walden was written so that the stay appears to be a year, with expressed seasonal divisions. Thoreau called it an experiment in simple living.

Walden is neither a novel nor a true autobiography, but a social critique of the Western World, with each chapter heralding some aspect of humanity that needed to be either renounced or praised. The work is part personal declaration of independence, social experiment, voyage of spiritual discovery, and manual for self reliance.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940013718203
Publisher:	Maran State Books
Publication date:	01/05/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	831 KB

About the Author

Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862; born David
Henry Thoreau) was an American author, naturalist,
transcendentalist, tax resister, development critic, and
philosopher who is best known for Walden, a reflection upon simple
living in natural surroundings, and his essay, Civil Disobedience,
an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral
opposition to an unjust state. Thoreau’s books, articles, essays,
journals, and poetry total over 20 volumes. Among his lasting
contributions were his writings on natural history and philosophy,
where he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and
environmental history, two sources of modern day environmentalism.
He was a lifelong abolitionist, delivering lectures that attacked
the Fugitive Slave Law while praising the writings of Wendell
Phillips and defending the abolitionist John Brown. Thoreau’s
philosophy of nonviolent resistance influenced the political
thoughts and actions of such later figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas
K. Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Some anarchists claim
Thoreau as an inspiration. Though Civil Disobedience calls for
improving rather than abolishing government — “I ask for, not at
once no government, but at once a better government” — the
direction of this improvement aims at anarchism: “‘That government
is best which governs not at all;’ and when men are prepared for
it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.”

Date of Birth:

July 12, 1817

Date of Death:

May 6, 1862

Place of Birth:

Concord, Massachusetts

Place of Death:

Concord, Massachusetts

Education:

Concord Academy, 1828-33); Harvard University, 1837