Walden
Henry David Thoreau (1854)
“A man quits civilization for two years to find out what it actually costs to be alive — and the answer indicts everyone who stayed.”
At a Glance
In July 1845, Henry David Thoreau moves to a self-built cabin on the shores of Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts — on land belonging to his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson — and lives there for two years, two months, and two days. He grows his own food, keeps meticulous accounts of every cent he earns and spends, reads Homer in the original Greek, observes ants wage war, watches ice melt in spring, and writes the most searching critique of American work culture ever published. Walden is simultaneously a nature journal, a financial ledger, a philosophical manifesto, and one man's extended argument that most people are dying for things they don't need.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Walden sold about 2,000 copies in the first five years and went out of print in Thoreau's lifetime. It was recovered by the generation after the Civil War and became a touchstone of American nature writing and political dissent. By the 20th century it was central to the canon of American literature and a philosophical source for the environmental movement, the back-to-the-land movements of the 1960s and 70s, and countless individual reinventions. 'Civil Disobedience,' written from the Walden experiment, directly influenced Gandhi's development of satyagraha and Martin Luther King Jr.'s nonviolent resistance strategy.
Diction Profile
High — Latinate vocabulary mixed with Yankee vernacular, classical allusions alongside bean-field accounts, sardonic humor embedded in earnest argument
Very high