Product Description

The final harvest of our great nature writer s last years, Wild Fruits presents Thoreau s distinctly American gospel a sacramental vision of nature in which "the tension between Thoreau the naturalist and Thoreau the missionary for nature s wonders invigorates nearly every page" (Time). In transcribing the 150-year-old manuscript s cryptic handwriting and complex notations, Thoreau specialist Bradley Dean has performed a "heroic feat of decipherment" (Booklist) to bring this great work to light. Readers will discover "passages that reach for the transcendentalist ideal of writing new scriptures, yet grounding this Bible in a vision of practical ecology" (Boston). Beautifully illustrated throughout with line drawings of the natural life Thoreau considers on his walks, Wild Fruits is "well worth any nature lover s attention" (Christian Science Monitor).

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #934391 in Books
• Published on: 2001-04-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 1.11" h x 7.03" w x 9.25" l, 1.81 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 430 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Henry David Thoreau was 44 years old when he died of tuberculosis in the early spring of 1862. He had acquired a measure of notoriety in his lifetime largely for his fervent support of abolitionism and his refusal to pay taxes to support the American war of conquest against Mexico, the subject of his widely circulated pamphlet Civil Disobedience. Closer to his hometown of Concord, Massachusetts, he was known as something of an eccentric who kept a home in the woods and took long walks when the citizens of the town were at work or church.

We scarcely know Thoreau better, writes archivist and scholar Bradley Dean: we still remember him today for having spent time in jail and spinning philosophy out of the New England woods. On the strength of this lost, and now published, final manuscript of Thoreau's, Dean would have us think of him as a proto-ecologist, and for very good reason. In the last years of his life, Thoreau resolved to learn better the science behind nature, and in Wild Fruits he collected the lore and facts surrounding the plants around his home, observing such things as the quantity of chestnuts that local trees were producing, the myriad shapes of pine cones as they unfold, the taste of "fever bush" and the smell of sweet gale.

The unfinished manuscript, cataloguing dozens of species, affords a fascinating glimpse into Thoreau's method as an amateur student of nature--a method worthy of close study and imitation. Dean adds greatly to it with his intelligent commentary, which revisits Thoreau's sources, corrects a few of his errors, and emphasises the writer's importance to natural history and belles lettres alike. --Gregory McNamee

From the Publisher
Bradley Dean lives and works at the Thoreau Institute in Lincoln, Massachusetts, where he is director of the Media Center. He has published widely on Thoreau and has taught at several major universities. Line drawings throughout, 3 facsimile manuscript pages.