Wa
l
den - an
annotated edition
by Henry David
Thoreau - 1854
Thoreau Reader: Home
"I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily
as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake
my
neighbors up." - from the title page of Walden
and "Where I Lived, & What I Lived for" |
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| "Thoreau pitched his Walden in this key; he
claps his wings
and gives forth a clear, saucy, cheery, triumphant note ... the book is
certainly the most delicious piece of brag in literature ... It is a
challenge
and a triumph, and has a morning freshness and élan..."
- John Burroughs |
Table of Contents
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Why did Henry Thoreau live in the woods? - a
quick answer
A paper due soon on Walden?
The Walden Express may be just your
ticket.
Ask Jimmy: collected
student questions & answers - the
primary
message of Walden
One Less Accountant -
"Thoreau and Emerson
saved me from spending a large chunk of my life as an accountant. Walden
had the approximate effect of a 2x4
thwacking
me between the eyes."
Thoreau’s First Year at Walden in
Fact & Fiction
- "What is it about Thoreau’s life at Walden that we find so
interesting?
Why does his experiment have such a hold on our imagination? More
importantly, what was it like, not only for him, but for his
contemporaries?"
Out of the
Woods: How I
Found My Muse at Walden Pond - "Thoreau had said, 'How vain it is
to
sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.' And during this
time I began to wonder, was I truly living?"
Walden
Pond: a First
Visitation - "It has been 156 years since you left your house at
Walden,
Henry ... so I thought it appropriate and timely to issue an update
about
what 'progress' has been made at the pond."
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A
contemporary review...
| "The economical details and
calculations in this
book are more curious than useful; for the author's life in the woods
was
on too narrow a scale to find imitators. But ... he says so many pithy
and brilliant things, and offers so many piquant, and, we may add, so
many
just, comments on society as it is, that this book is well worth the
reading,
both for its actual contents and its suggestive capacity."
- A.P. Peabody, North American
Review, 1854
100 years later... |
| "Thoreau, very likely without quite
knowing what
he was up to, took man's relation to nature and man's dilemma in
society
and man's capacity for elevating his spirit and he beat all these
matters
together, in a wild free interval of self-justification and delight,
and
produced an original omelette from which people can draw nourishment in
a hungry day."
- E.B. White, The Yale Review,
1954
|
Photographs: Walden
Pond - Past & Present
Walden,
The Place - By Ronald Wesley Hoag
Thoreau's own 1846
survey map of Walden Pond
A ghostly Encounter
- poem by Amy Belding Brown
The
Walden
Woods of Thoreau's Youth - an
early map
From Google Earth - what
Walden looks like from space
Thoreau quotes, mostly
from Walden, with
links to their sources
Search for words or phrases
in Walden
in the Princeton
Text
Archive
For the more obscure words
- Webster's
Unabridged Dictionary, 1913 Edition
| "Our problem today is that we have allowed the internal
to become lost
in the external ... So much of modern life can be summarized in that
arresting
dictum of the poet Thoreau: 'Improved means to an unimproved end'." -
Martin
Luther King, Jr., Nobel
Lecture, December 11, 1964 |
| "In Walden, Thoreau ... opens the inner
frontier of self-discovery
as no American book had up to this time. As deceptively modest as
Thoreau's
ascetic life, it is no less than a guide to living the classical ideal
of the good life. Both poetry and philosophy, this long poetic essay
challenges
the reader to examine his or her life and live it authentically." - Kathryn
VanSpanckeren |
| "The best and most
Romantic
memoir an American has produced is Walden
— though nobody calls it one. ... What Thoreau has to
overcome during his time in the woods is not a lapse in mental health.
His great problem is to escape the mental health of his neighbors,
their collection-plate opinions, their studious repetition of gossip
... There's not a note in the book of self-pity, or nostalgia. And why
did
he quit his cabin in the end? 'It seemed to me that I had several
more
lives to live.'" - Benjamin Kunkel |
More information: Links
to other Walden web pages
Walden was originally published as: Walden;
or, Life in the Woods
Drawing by Sophia Thoreau - This edition
copyright
© 1999-2009 Richard Lenat, all rights reserved
Comments or questions to: Richard Lenat - rlenat@yahoo.com
Thoreau Reader: Home
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