A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

Henry David Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers was his first book-length work (published in 1849), prior to his more well-known Walden, and written during his two-year “experiment” in solitude at Walden Pond. The main theme of this book is based on a two-week river excursion that Thoreau took with his brother John in the late summer of 1839, condensed down to a single week, and contains not only a plethora of observations on the various natural phenomena that were encountered during their trip, but a whole variety of musings on philosophy, classical literature, poetry and the “social condition” of his contemporaries.