Walden

Walden is a book by the American writer Henry David Thoreau, first published in 1854 under the longer title Walden; or, Life in the Woods. Part memoir and part argument, it has been read ever since as one of the founding texts of American nature writing.

Thoreau went to the woods in 1845 and built his cabin on land owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson, his friend and mentor, staying two years, two months and two days. He writes about his bean field and his visitors, the trains that passed within earshot of the pond, the colour and clarity of the different waters, the freezing and thawing of the ice, and the soundings by which he worked out the depth and shape of a pond that people had called bottomless. He also names the plants and animals he meets by both their popular and their scientific names.

Running alongside the natural history is a refusal of ordinary working life, which Thoreau believed left his neighbours no time to live. He makes a case for simplicity, solitude and close attention to the ordinary world, and the book has been read as a personal declaration of independence as much as a record of two years in a cabin.