Most Popular Books by Henry David Thoreau

In July 1845, Henry David Thoreau built a small cottage in the woods near Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. During the two years and two months he spent there, he began to write Walden, a chronicle of his communion with nature that became one of the most influential and compelling books in American literature. Since its first publication on August 9, 1854, by Ticknor and Fields, the work has become a classic, beloved for its message of living simply and in harmony with nature. This edition of Walden features exquisite wood engravings by Michael McCurdy, one of America's leading engravers and woodblock artists. McCurdy's engravings bring the text to life--and illuminate the spirit of Thoreau's prose. Also included is a foreword by noted author, environmentalist, and naturalist Terry Tempest Williams who reflects upon Thoreau's message that as we explore our world and ourselves, we draw ever closer to the truth of our connectedness.

Raymond Borst's The Thoreau Log should set to rest forever the notion that Thoreau lived an isolated life. Drawing from a wide array of contemporary sources, including public records, the Harvard College archives, the diaries, journals, and letters of his friends and acquaintances, newspaper reports, his publishers' records, legal documents, reviews of his works, and Thoreau's own Journal, Borst has reconstructed a detailed account of Thoreau's life that informs us of what Thoreau did, who he saw, who he corresponded with, what he was reading, and what he was thinking on a day-by-day basis.

Walden details Henry David Thoreau's experiences over the course of two years, two months, and two days in a cabin owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson. The text is a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings. The work is part social experiment, voyage of spiritual discovery, satire, and-to some degree-a manual for self-reliance.

In 1848, Henry David Thoreau twice delivered lectures in Concord, Massachusetts, on “the relationship of the individual to the state.” The essay now known as Civil Disobedience is a significant and widely admired contribution to abolitionist literature, as well as an anti-war tract, but Thoreau’s focus is less on political organization and solidarity than it is on personal choice and individual responsibility. Cultivating personal integrity in the face of political injustice is the project Thoreau defends in Civil Disobedience; this focus has made the work highly influential for twentieth- and twenty-first-century political movements. Bob Pepperman Taylor’s new Introduction explains the work’s specific political context, helping readers to understand the text as Thoreau wrote it. The edition also offers a number of historical documents on Thoreau’s abolitionism; the war with Mexico; and Thoreau’s philosophical development in relation to other thinkers.

Describes how Blanche Douglas Leathers studied the Mississippi River and passed the test to become a steamboat captain in 1894.

In 1845, Thoreau moved to a cabin that he built with his own hands along the shores of Walden Pond in Massachusetts. Shedding the trivial ties that he felt bound much of humanity, Thoreau reaped from the land both physically and mentally, and pursued truth in the quiet of nature. In Walden, he explains how separating oneself from the world of men can truly awaken the sleeping self. Thoreau holds fast to the notion that you have not truly existed until you adopt such a lifestyle-and only then can you reenter society, as an enlightened being. These simple but profound musings-as well as "Civil Disobedience," his protest against the government's interference with civil liberty-have inspired many to embrace his philosophy of individualism and love of nature

Walden (first published as Walden; or, Life in the Woods) is a book by transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau. The text is a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings. The work is part personal declaration of independence, social experiment, voyage of spiritual discovery, satire, and-to some degree-a manual for self-reliance.First published in 1854, Walden details Thoreau's experiences over the course of two years, two months, and two days in a cabin he built near Walden Pond amidst woodland owned by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, near Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau used this time (July 4, 1845 - September 6, 1847) to write his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. The experience later inspired Walden, in which Thoreau compresses the time into a single calendar year and uses passages of four seasons to symbolize human development.

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. Simplify, Simplify distills Thoreau's massive body of work into 750 of his most profound ideas on subjects ranging from the ecology movement to English literature, from Confucius to John Milton.