This carefully crafted ebook: "WALDEN (American Classics Series)” is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. Walden details Thoreau's experiences over the course of two years, two months, and two days in a cabin he built in the woods near Walden Pond, Massachusetts. Thoreau compresses the time into a single calendar year and uses passages of four seasons to symbolize human development. Part memoir, part personal quest, the book is a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, where Thoreau hoped to gain a more objective understanding of society through personal introspection. Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was an American essayist, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, surveyor, and historian. A leading transcendentalist, Thoreau is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay Civil Disobedience, an argument for disobedience to an unjust state.

This carefully crafted ebook: "WALDEN (American Classics Series)" is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. Walden details Thoreau's experiences over the course of two years, two months, and two days in a cabin he built in the woods near Walden Pond, Massachusetts. Thoreau compresses the time into a single calendar year and uses passages of four seasons to symbolize human development. Part memoir, part personal quest, the book is a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, where Thoreau hoped to gain a more objective understanding of society through personal introspection. Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was an American essayist, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, surveyor, and historian. A leading transcendentalist, Thoreau is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay Civil Disobedience, an argument for disobedience to an unjust state.

One of the most influential and compelling books in American literature, Walden is a vivid account of the years that Henry D. Thoreau spent alone in a secluded cabin at Walden Pond. This edition--introduced by noted American writer John Updike--celebrates the perennial importance of a classic work, originally published in 1854. Much of Walden's material is derived from Thoreau's journals and contains such engaging pieces from the lively "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For" and "Brute Neighbors" to the serene "Reading" and "The Pond in the Winter." Other famous sections involve Thoreau's visits with a Canadian woodcutter and with an Irish family, a trip to Concord, and a description of his bean field. This is the complete and authoritative text of Walden--as close to Thoreau's original intention as all available evidence allows. This is the authoritative text of Walden and the ideal presentation of Thoreau's great document of social criticism and dissent.

Henry David Thoreau's vision of personal freedom is indelibly etched on the American consciousness. 'We need the tonic of wildness,' Thoreau wrote in Walden, and by turning his back on town amenities to build a house on Walden Pond in 1845, he helped shape our notions of the individual, subsistence, and a moral relation to nature. Raising white beans and potatoes that he sold to his Concord neighbors, he stayed for two years; his book records both the philosophy he developed while living alone and the facts of his everyday life. Included here with the complete text of Walden are selections from Thoreau's first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers; 'A Plea for Captain John Brown,' his eloquent defense of the American abolitionist's rebellion at Harper's Ferry, and such masterpieces as his famous essay 'Civil Disobedience,' in which he describes a night spent in prison for refusing to pay a poll tax to a government that condoned slavery.

In 1845 Henry David Thoreau, disdainful of America's growing commercialism and industrialism, left his home town of Concord, Massachusetts to begin a new life alone, in a rough hut on the north-west shore of Walden Pond. Walden is Thoreau's classic autobiographical account of this experiment in solitary living. This new edition of Walden traces the sources of Thoreau's reading and thinking and considers the author in the context of his birthplace and his sense of its history - social, economic and natural. In addition, an ecological appendix provides modern identifications of the myriad plants and animals to which Thoreau gave increasingly close attention as he became acclimatized to his life in the woods by Walden Pond. - ;`The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation' In 1845 Henry David Thoreau left his home town of Concord, Massachusetts to begin a new life alone, in a rough hut he built himself a mile and a half away on the north-west shore of Walden Pond. Walden is Thoreau's classic autobiographical account of this experiment in solitary living, his refusal to play by the rules of hard work and the accumulation of wealth and above all the freedom it gave him to adapt his living to the natural world around him. This new edition of Walden traces the sources of Thoreau's reading and thinking and considers the author in the context of his birthplace and his sense of its history - social, economic and natural. In addition, an ecological appendix provides modern identifications of the myriad plants and animals to which Thoreau gave increasingly close attention as he became acclimatized to his life in the woods by Walden Pond. -

Walden details Thoreau's experiment with self-reliance living by a pond near Concord, MA in 1845-46. His intent is to explore the spiritual benefits of a simplified life. "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things. When we consider what, to use the words of the catechism, is the chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life, it appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left. But alert and healthy natures remember that the sun rose clear. It is never too late to give up our prejudices. No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof. What everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true to-day may turn out to be falsehood to-morrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields."

Henry David Thoreau was just a few days short of his twenty-eighth birthday when he built a cabin on the shore of Walden Pond and began one of the most famous experiments in living in American history. Originally he was not, apparently, intending to write a book about his life at the pond, but nine years later, in August of 1854, Houghton Mifflin's predecessor, Ticknor and Fields, published Walden; or, a Life in the Woods. At the time the book was largely ignored, and it took five years to sell out the first printing of two thousand copies. It was not until 1862, the year of Thoreau's death, that the book was brought back into print. Since then It has never been out of print. Published in hundreds of editions and translated into virtually every modern language, it has become one of the most widely read and influential books ever written, not only in this country but throughout the world. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is proud to present the most beautiful edition ever published of Thoreau's masterpiece. This new edition features spectacular color photographs by Scot Miller that capture Walden as vividly as Thoreau's words do. The book is being published in association with the Walden Woods Project, which is dedicated to preserving the lands Thoreau wrote about. For each copy sold, Houghton Mifflin and Scot Miller are making a donation to the Walden Woods Project.