WALDEN

Walden (also known as Life in the Woods) by Henry David Thoreau is one of the best-known non-fiction books written by an American. Published in 1854, it details Thoreau's life for two years and two months in second-growth forest around the shores of Walden Pond, not far from his friends and family in Concord, Massachusetts. Walden was written so that the stay appears to be a year, with expressed seasonal divisions. Thoreau called it an experiment in simple living. Walden is neither a novel nor a true autobiography, but a social critique of the Western World, with each chapter heralding some aspect of humanity that needed to be either renounced or praised. The work is part personal declaration of independence, social experiment, voyage of spiritual discovery, and manual for self reliance. (from Wikipedia).



Walden was written by noted transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau and is a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings.



This book details Thoreau's experiences over the course of two years, two months, and two days in a cabin he built near Walden Pond, amidst woodland owned by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, near Concord, Massachusetts.



The work is part personal declaration of independence, social experiment, voyage of spiritual discovery, satire, and manual for self-reliance.



In 1854, Thoreau published the book by which he will always be best known, Walden, or Life in the Woods. It is by far the deepest, richest, and most closely jointed of his books. It shows Thoreau at his best, and contains all that he had to say to the world. In fact, he is a man of one book, and that book is Walden. In plan, it is open to the same objection as "A Week", and might almost plead guilty to the charge of obtaining a hearing under false pretences. "Life in the woods" suggests the atmosphere of As You Like It and the Robin Hood ballads, but not moralizings on economy and the duty of being yourself. The reader who takes up the book with the idea that he is going to enjoy another Robinson Crusoe will not be pleased to find that every now and then he will have to listen to a lay sermon, or a lyceum lecture.



One of the most famous non-fiction American books, Walden by Henry David Thoreau is the history of Thoreau's visit to Ralph Waldo Emerson's woodland retreat near Walden Pond. Thoreau, stirred by the philosophy of the transcendentalists, used the sojourn as an experiment in self reliance and minimalism... "so as to "live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." Walden stresses the significance of self-reliance, solitude, meditation, and nature in rising above the the life of quiet desperation lived by most people. that, he argues, is the lot of most people. Part autobiography, part manifesto Walden is a moving treatise on the importance distancing oneself from the consumerism of modern Western society and embracing nature in its place.