About Walden

By Henry David Thoreau · first published in 1854 · Non-fiction

On the fourth of July 1845, Henry David Thoreau moved into a cabin he had built himself on the shore of Walden Pond, on land owned by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson a short walk from the town of Concord, Massachusetts. He stayed for two years, two months and two days. Walden, published nine years later, is his account of that time.

It is not quite a memoir and not quite a nature book. The long first chapter, Economy, lists exactly what the cabin cost to build (twenty-eight dollars and twelve and a half cents) and argues that most people work far harder than they need to in order to pay for things they do not want. Later chapters follow the seasons at the pond: hoeing beans, measuring the depth of the water, watching a battle between red and black ants, listening to the ice crack in winter.

Thoreau was not a hermit. He walked into town most days and had frequent visitors, and he says so. His experiment was to find out how little a person needs, and what becomes possible once that is settled. The book sold poorly in his lifetime and has since influenced readers from Gandhi to the modern environmental movement. This preview contains the opening pages of Economy.