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Walden; or Life in the Woods
Book

Walden; or Life in the Woods

Boston, 1854

Literary Classic

  • Diary
  • Transcendentalism

What It’s About

The Simple Life

Henry David Thoreau may have escaped to the wilderness to write Walden; or Life in the Woods nearly two centuries ago, but it wouldn’t be hard to imagine his book sitting on a bestseller list next to Eat, Pray, Love or Under the Tuscan Sun. Writing during the early Industrial Revolution, just when the railroad had reached his hometown, he struggles with the purpose of life, the ever-quickening pace of work, the futility of materialism and the neglect of appreciating the beauty in the natural world. As canny today as it was in antebellum America, Thoreau’s book shows how far people have come and how little the human condition has changed over the decades.

Summary

Trapped by a Fear of the Future

Most people live dull and desperate lives. Day in and day out, they toil away, just to eke out a miserable existence as a reward for their hard work. They claim that endless labor will liberate them, while in fact their fear of the future and relentless anxiety about impoverishment enslaves them. They’re under the illusion they have the freedom of choice, but they are, in fact, subject to their own needs and desires.

The experiences of other people don’t help: Their insights are far too limited, so reduced in scope to each individual’s life that they lack any relevance whatsoever to another person’s existence. Faced with this dismal reality, Henry David Thoreau decides to live in harmony with nature, in order to identify the real necessities in life.

Fulfilling Basic Needs

Before embarking on such an experiment, you have to prepare wisely and make sure you have the four necessities of life: food, shelter, clothing and fuel. Pragmatism is paramount, and you soon realize which garments are comfortable and suitable for the change of seasons; after all, nature doesn’t care about your...

About the Author

Henry David Thoreau was born on July 12, 1817, in Concord, Massachusetts. His father was a failed grocer with a struggling pencil-making business, so when Thoreau entered Harvard College in 1833, his entire family chipped in to raise the price of the tuition. In 1835, in order to earn money, he took temporary leave to teach school. An avid reader, Thoreau studied philosophy, math, history, astronomy, theology, English, Greek, Latin, Italian, French, German and Spanish. After graduating in 1837, he began teaching public school in Concord, but after just two weeks, he resigned because he refused to use corporal punishment on his students. A year later, still unemployed, he founded a private school with his brother John, which featured unorthodox subjects such as field trips into nature and visits to local businesses. During this time, the brothers fell in love with the same girl, Ellen Sewell, and proposed marriage. She refused both proposals. The school closed when John contracted tuberculosis and died in early 1842. Thoreau befriended the writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, 14 years his senior, who introduced Thoreau to the Transcendentalist circle of poets and philosophers, which included, among others, Margaret Fuller and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Thoreau lived in Emerson’s household for three years, tutoring his mentor’s children. From 1845 to 1847, he occupied a cabin near Walden Pond to live simply and in harmony with nature. An active abolitionist, he was arrested for his refusal to pay the poll tax as an act of political protest and spent one night in prison. The incident resulted in his essay “Civil Disobedience,” written while at Walden, which would later become a major inspiration to dissidents and activists for many causes. After leaving the woods – the final draft of Walden; or Life in the Woods wasn’t published until 1854 – he became involved in his family’s pencil-making business again and worked as a land and property surveyor, which provided him ample time outdoors. When the US Fugitive Slave Law passed in 1850, he actively supported the Underground Railroad together with his mother and sister, helping runaway African-Americans from the South escape into free US states and Canada. He traveled beyond Concord, making trips to Maine, where he depended on Indian guides to learn and document as much as he could about their rapidly disappearing culture. Thoreau, who had been suffering from tuberculosis since 1835, died from the effects of bronchitis on May 6, 1862 at age 44.


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