Walden and Civil Disobedience

Description

"Walden" was the fruit of Thoreau's two-year stay on the Walden Pond. He carefully shaped the book to follow the natural cycle of the seasons, yet it is more than an account of life in the woods, it is a quest for personal freedom and individuality that evokes nature without being sentimental or distorting the natural world. Though widely reviewed at the time of publication, sales did not reflect the attention the book received. It has now become an American classic. "Civil Disobedience", was also based on Thoreau's experiences during the period he lived on the pond. In 1846, he was arrested for not having paid his poll tax, as a way of demonstrating that he did not recognize the authority of a government that "buys and sells men, women, and children." It is a treatise against slavery and a government that wages war to support injustice.

Henry David Thoreauwas born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1817. He graduated from Harvard in 1837, the same year he began his lifelong Journal. Inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau became a key member of the Transcendentalist movement that included Margaret Fuller and Bronson Alcott. The Transcendentalists' faith in nature was tested by Thoreau between 1845 and 1847 when he lived for twenty-six months in a homemade hut at Walden Pond. While living at Walden, Thoreau worked on the two books published during his lifetimeWalden(1854) andA Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers(1849). Several of his other works, includingThe Maine Woods, Cape Cod, andExcursions, were published posthumously. Thoreau died in Concord, at the age of forty-four, in 1862. Kristen Case teaches at the University of Maine at Farmington, where she is associate professor of English. She is the author of American Pragmatism andPoetic Practice Crosscurrents from Emerson to Susan Howe (Camden House, 2011) and Little Arias,a collection of poems (New Issues Press, 2015). She is coeditor of Thoreau at 200 Essays andReassessments (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and has published articles on Thoreau, EzraPound, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and William James. She lives inTemple, Maine.