Henry David Thoreau : a life / Laura Dassow Walls.
Walls, Laura Dassow, author.; ProQuest (Firm)
2017
PS3053 .W28 2017
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Title Henry David Thoreau : a life / Laura Dassow Walls.
Author Walls, Laura Dassow, author.
ISBN 9780226344720 (electronic book)
022634472X (electronic book)
9780226344690
022634469X
Published Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2017.
Copyright ©2017
Language English
Description 1 online resource (xx, 615 pages, 32 unnumbered pages of plates) : illustrations, maps.
Call Number PS3053 .W28 2017
Dewey Decimal Classification 818/.309 B
Summary "Walden. Yesterday I came here to live." That entry from the journal of Henry David Thoreau, and the intellectual journey it began, would by themselves be enough to place Thoreau in the American pantheon. His attempt to "live deliberately" in a small woods at the edge of his hometown of Concord has been a touchstone for individualists and seekers since the publication of Walden in 1854. But there was much more to Thoreau than his brief experiment in living at Walden Pond. A member of the vibrant intellectual circle centered on his neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson, he was also an ardent naturalist, a manual laborer and inventor, a radical political activist, and more. Many books have taken up various aspects of Thoreau's character and achievements, but, as Laura Dassow Walls writes, "Thoreau has never been captured between covers; he was too quixotic, mischievous, many-sided." Two hundred years after his birth, and two generations after the last full-scale biography, Walls renews Henry David Thoreau for us in all his profound, inspiring complexity. Drawing on Thoreau's copious writings, published and unpublished, Walls presents a Thoreau vigorously alive, full of quirks and contradictions: the young man shattered by the sudden death of his brother; the ambitious Harvard College student; the ecstatic visionary who closed Walden with an account of the regenerative power of the Cosmos. We meet the man whose belief in human freedom and the value of labor made him an uncompromising abolitionist; the solitary walker who found society in nature, but also found his own nature in the society of which he was a deeply interwoven part. And, running through it all, Thoreau the passionate naturalist, who, long before the age of environmentalism, saw tragedy for future generations in the human heedlessness around him. "The Thoreau I sought was not in any book, so I wrote this one," says Walls. The result is a Thoreau unlike any seen since he walked the streets of Concord, a Thoreau for our time and all time.--Dust jacket
Bibliography, etc. Note Includes bibliographical references and index.
Access Note Access limited to authorized users
Reproduction Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI Available via World Wide Web.
Source of Description Description based on print version record.
Added Corporate Author ProQuest (Firm)
Available in Other Form Original 022634469X
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Introduction: land of the grass-ground river
The making of Thoreau. Concord sons and daughters ; Higher learning from Concord to Harvard (1826-1837) ; Transcendental apprentice (1837-1841) ; "Not till we are lost" (1842-1844)
The making of Walden. "Walden, is it you?" (1845-1847) ; A writer's life (1847-1849) ; From Concord to Cosmos: Thoreau's turn to science (1849-1851) ; The beauty of nature, the baseness of men (1852-1854)
Successions. Walden-on-Main (1854-1857) ; Wild fruits (1857-1859) ; A constant new creation (1860-1862).

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