by Henry David Thoreau is one of the best-known non-fiction books written by an American. Published in 1854, it details Thoreau's sojourn in a cabin near Walden Pond, amidst woodland owned by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, near Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau lived at Walden for two years, two months, and two days, but Walden was written so that the stay appears to be a year, with expressed seasonal divisions. Thoreau did not intend to live as a hermit, for he received visitors and returned their visits. Instead, he hoped to isolate himself from society in order to gain a more objective understanding of it. Simplicity and self-reliance were Thoreau's other goals, and the whole project was inspired by Transcendentalist philosophy. However the house was not in wilderness but at the edge of town, 1. 5 miles (2. 4 km) from his family home, and his mother cooked him meals and cleaned the house.

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Walden (first published as Walden; or, Life in the Woods) is an American book written by noted Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau. The work is part personal declaration of independence, social experiment, voyage of spiritual discovery, satire, and manual for self reliance. Published in 1854, it details Thoreau's experiences over the course of two years in a cabin he built near Walden Pond, amidst woodland owned by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, near Concord, Massachusetts. By immersing himself in nature, Thoreau hoped to gain a more objective understanding of society through personal introspection. Simple living and self-sufficiency were Thoreau's other goals, and the whole project was inspired by transcendentalist philosophy, a central theme of the American Romantic Period. As Thoreau made clear in his book, his cabin was not in wilderness but at the edge of town, about two miles (3 km) from his family home.

Henry D. Thoreau traveled to the backwoods of Maine in 1846, 1853, and 1857. Originally published in 1864, and published now with a new introduction by Paul Theroux, this volume is a powerful telling of those journeys through a rugged and largely unspoiled land. It presents Thoreau's fullest account of the wilderness. The Maine Woods is classic Thoreau: a personal story of exterior and interior discoveries in a natural setting--all conveyed in taut, masterly prose. Thoreau's evocative renderings of the life of the primitive forest--its mountains, waterways, fauna, flora, and inhabitants--are timeless and valuable on their own. But his impassioned protest against the despoilment of nature in the name of commerce and sport, which even by the 1850s threatened to deprive Americans of the "tonic of wildness," makes The Maine Woods an especially vital book for our own time.

Thoreau's major essays annotated and introduced by one of our most vital intellectuals.With The Essays of Henry D. Thoreau, Lewis Hyde gathers thirteen of Thoreau's finest short prose works and, for the first time in 150 years, presents them fully annotated and arranged in the order of their composition. This definitive edition includes Thoreau's most famous essays, "Civil Disobedience" and "Walking," along with lesser-known masterpieces such as "Wild Apples," "The Last Days of John Brown," and an account of his 1846 journey into the Maine wilderness to climb Mount Katahdin, an essay that ends on a unique note of sublimity and terror.Hyde diverges from the long-standing and dubious editorial custom of separating Thoreau's politics from his interest in nature, a division that has always obscured the ways in which the two are constantly entwined. "Natural History of Massachusetts" begins not with fish and birds but with a dismissal of the political...

To coincide with the bicentennial of Thoreau's birth and TarcherPerigee's publication of Expect Great Things: The Life of Henry David Thoreau, here is a sumptuous rediscovery edition of the first illustrated volume of Thoreau's classic, as originally issued in 1897.In 1897, thirty-five years after Thoreau's death, Houghton Mifflin issued a two-volume "Holiday Edition" of Walden illustrated with thirty remarkable engravings, daguerreotypes, and period photographs. In 1902 the publisher collected the work into a single volume. Now, to mark the bicentennial of Thoreau's birth in 1817, this timeless landmark is reproduced with all of the original illustrations and the complete text of his mystical, practical, magisterial record of a life in the woods.From the Trade Paperback edition.