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.”
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Thematic connections across eras and genres — books that talk to each other.
Civil Disobedience
Henry David Thoreau
Written from the same period and the same experiment — the jailing at Walden is the seed of the political theory that influenced Gandhi and King
Self-Reliance (Essays)
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The philosophical framework Walden puts into practice — Emerson argues for self-reliance abstractly; Thoreau builds a cabin
Into the Wild
Jon Krakauer
Chris McCandless carried a copy of Walden to Alaska — a modern attempt at the same experiment, without Thoreau's safety net, with fatal consequences
Small Is Beautiful
E. F. Schumacher
The 20th-century economic argument for Thoreau's position — against GDP-growth as the measure of human flourishing
The Overstory
Richard Powers
Contemporary nature writing that takes Thoreau's attention to the nonhuman world and extends it to ecological crisis
A Sand County Almanac
Aldo Leopold
The founding text of ecological ethics — Leopold inherits Thoreau's practice of slow seasonal attention and converts it into environmental philosophy