Walden; or, Life in the Woods: (Unabridged) (From the original 1854 manuscript)

by Henry David Thoreau

"The best digital copy of the original 1854 book!"

First Edition Classics Walden; or Life in the Woods, by Henry David Thoreau.

Over the course of two years and two months, Henry David Thoreau lived in a cabin he had “built himself” on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, where he lived a simple life, and earned his living by the labor of his “hands only. With his experiment in simple living, Thoreau expresses his personal declaration of independence by means of self-reliance and scientific observation.

This digital copy is unabridged and "unedited," and formatted from the original 1854 edition. Errors in the original text were left in this book on purpose.

Page numbers have been modified, and tables were illustrated for the purpose and ease of electronic distribution. The three Illustrations showing ice harvesting were not in the original 1854 edition.

223 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 4, 2023

About the author

Henry David Thoreau (born David Henry Thoreau) was an American author, naturalist, transcendentalist, tax resister, development critic, philosopher, and abolitionist who is best known for Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay, Civil Disobedience, an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state.

Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry total over 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions were his writings on natural history and philosophy, where he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern day environmentalism.

In 1817, Henry David Thoreau was born in Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard University in 1837, taught briefly, then turned to writing and lecturing. Becoming a Transcendentalist and good friend of Emerson, Thoreau lived the life of simplicity he advocated in his writings. His two-year experience in a hut in Walden, on land owned by Emerson, resulted in the classic, Walden: Life in the Woods (1854). During his sojourn there, Thoreau refused to pay a poll tax in protest of slavery and the Mexican war, for which he was jailed overnight. His activist convictions were expressed in the groundbreaking On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (1849). In a diary he noted his disapproval of attempts to convert the Algonquins "from their own superstitions to new ones." In a journal he noted dryly that it is appropriate for a church to be the ugliest building in a village, "because it is the one in which human nature stoops to the lowest and is the most disgraced." (Cited by James A. Haught in 2000 Years of Disbelief.) When Parker Pillsbury sought to talk about religion with Thoreau as he was dying from tuberculosis, Thoreau replied: "One world at a time."

Thoreau's philosophy of nonviolent resistance influenced the political thoughts and actions of such later figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. D. 1862.

More: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/tho...

http://thoreau.eserver.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Da...

http://transcendentalism-legacy.tamu....

http://www.biography.com/people/henry...

Reviews

[Clarise Ng · Rating 4 out of 5]

A cabin built by hand by a bottomless pond. Where every morning he bathed. And from whose well he drank. And with a dipper offered weary strangers refreshments. For society, nature. And a face in the fire during winter. And the woods’ dwellers from the past. For food, beans and peas he farmed. And huckleberries he foraged. Made sweeter because picked by his own hands.

How brave it was for Thoreau to dare to live simply. How jealous am I of the fruits he reaped from such a life. He lived abstemiously but richly. 🍃