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.”
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.
Firsts & Innovations
The first American book to treat financial accounting as a philosophical method
One of the first works to argue for environmental attention as a form of spiritual discipline (predating the environmental movement by a century)
The founding text of voluntary simplicity as a political and philosophical position
Cultural Impact
The phrase 'quiet desperation' entered common usage to describe meaningless work and conventional life
The 'different drummer' passage is among the most quoted in American literature and has appeared in everything from graduation speeches to tattoos
Influenced Gandhi's development of satyagraha and nonviolent civil disobedience — which influenced the American civil rights movement
The back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s-70s was explicitly Thoreauvian in its rhetoric
Required reading in virtually every American college-level American literature course
The term 'Walden' has become shorthand for deliberate simplicity — 'going Walden' is still understood as cultural shorthand
Banned & Challenged
Walden has not been commonly banned, but it has been challenged and dismissed: the Soviet Union used it as propaganda evidence of capitalist failure, while American conservatives have occasionally denounced it as encouraging irresponsibility and tax evasion. Its anticonsumerism makes it uncomfortable to commercial culture generally.