'The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation'

In 1845, Henry David Thoreau left his hometown of Concord, Massachusetts to begin a new life alone, in a rough hut he built himself a mile and a half away on the north-west shore of Walden Pond.

Walden is Thoreau's classic autobiographical account of his experiment in solitary living, his refusal to play by the rules of hard work and the accumulation of wealth, and above all the freedom it gave him to adapt his living to the natural world around him. This new edition traces the sources of Thoreau's reading and thinking and considers the author in the context of his birthplace and sense of history--social, economic, and natural. An ecological appendix provides modern identifications of the myriad plants and animals to which he gave close attention as he became acclimated to his life in the woods by Walden Pond.

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Features

• Ecological appendix
• Maps
• Comprehensive annotation

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Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Note on the Text
Select Bibliography
A Chronology of Henry David Thoreau
Map: Concord, Massachusetts
Map: Concord area
Walden
Appendix
Explanatory Notes
Footnotes

Henry David Thoreau

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Stephen Fender.

Stephen Allen Fender is Professor of American Studies and Director of the Graduate Research Centre in the Humanities, School of English and American Studies at the University of Sussex. His books include Plotting the Golden West: American Literature and the Rhetoric of the California Trail and Sea Changes: British Emigration and American Literature.

Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1817 and is known for his extreme individualism, his preference for simple, austere living, and revolt against the demands of society and government. His other works are A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), Civil Disobedience (1849), Excursions, (1863) and The Maine Woods (1864).