Product Description

`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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2109 in Books
• Published on: 1995-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

About the Author
Stephen Allen Fender is Professor of American Studies and Director of the Graduate Research Centre in the Humanities, School of English and American Studies at the University of Sussex. His books include Plotting the Golden West: American Literature and the Rhetoric of the California Trail and Sea Changes: British Emigration and American Literature.

Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1817 and is known for his extreme individualism, his preference for simple, austere living, and revolt against the demands of society and government. His other works are A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), Civil Disobedience (1849), Excursions, (1863) and The Maine Woods (1864).

Customer Reviews

A Jewel
I find it hard to believe that the above reviewers are talking about the same book. This book is one of my personal treasures. Thoreau seems to embody the intelligence and wit of a great thinker with a childlike enthusiasm and excitement about the beauty of the natural world. When you combine that with his desire to live life and his respect for even the most humble of his fellow men you are in for some profound literature. This is not a book to be scan read or rushed through. Savour it, I don't see how you could be disappointed.

Hard work
Not the spiritually ascendant promotion of natural living that some seem to believe, Walden is an account of the time Thoreau lived on his own at Walden Pond. At times introspective yet deep, at other times tedious and slow, the book contains moments wherein the author seems to read aloud from the collective human soul; for these moments, which will strike a chord in anyone, the book is worth a read. However it is a product of it's time, and to people who do not much care how many dollars and cents could have been spent in the 19th century to build a wooden hut in a forest, there is a certain amount of sorting wheat from the chaff. A book for those with patience, and lots of it, but there is a reward there if you dig deep enough.

Truly a world classic. Great writing. A life-changing read.
This is a book to be pondered, to be read slowly, a book worth the effort to read in order to understand what Thoreau is saying, and to see the application to him- or herself, now, today. As happens with great writing, the reader is changed by this book. Even in reading the first few pages, the reader has a profound experience. Multiply that by reading Walden in entirety and the reader emerges a different person. However, the reader must be willing to enter into Thoreau's world and his experience. Readers who find such writing tedious are, one suspects, too used to reading fast-paced novels. For those with an interest in history, philosophy, the human condition, truth in reality, and simply in having an educated mind, there is no greater work. Walden is truly a world classic.