Walden, or Life in the Woods

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.” And so it began. Henry David Thoreau, at 27, built a tiny, one-room cabin in the woods - on land owned by his friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson - and began his two-year experiment in frugality on the shore of Walden Pond. He wasn't seeking isolation so much as simplicity, to “live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, ...