Walden

Front Cover
HarperCollins, Mar 3, 2015 - Social Science - 320 pages

On July 4, 1845, Henry David Thoreau began a two-year experiment living in a solitary, self-built hut on the edge of Walden Pond outside of Concord, Massachusetts. In Walden, Thoreau wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Walden is a detailed account of how and why Thoreau lived in relative seclusion, and his conclusions about living deliberately, and human nature.

Though Walden was only moderately successful upon its original publication, it became an important work of the transcendentalist movement and is now accepted as one of the most important works of American literature, contributing significantly to Western, and particularly American, psychology.

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Contents

Chapter IEconomy
Complemental VersesThe Pretensions of Poverty
Chapter IIWhere I Lived and What I Lived
Chapter IIIReading
Chapter IVSounds
Chapter VSolitude
Chapter VIVisitors
Chapter VIIThe BeanField
Chapter VIIIThe Village
Chapter IXThe Ponds
Chapter XBaker Farm
Chapter XIHigher Laws
Chapter XIIBrute Neighbors
Chapter XIIIHouseWarming
Chapter XIVFormer InhabitantsandWinter Visitors Chapter XVWinter Animals

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About the author (2015)

Henry David Thoreau was born in 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts. He spent time as a school teacher after attending Harvard College but was dismissed for his refusal to administer corporal punishment. In 1845, wanting to write his first book, he moved to Walden Pond and built his cabin on land owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson. It was during his time at Walden that Thoreau was imprisoned briefly for not paying taxes; this experience became the basis for his well-known essay "Civil Disobedience." He died of tuberculosis in 1862 at the age of 44.

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