A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers; Walder, or Life in the Woods; The Maine Woods; Cape Cod

1144 Pages·1985·78.152 MB·English

by  Thoreau, Henry David

A Week on the Concord and
Merrimack Rivers Walden
The Maine Woods Cape Cod
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Collected for the first time in one volume, these are
the four full-length works in which Thoreau com-
bined his p oetic sensibility, classical learning, philo-
sophical austerity, and Yankee love of practical detail
into a lifelong literary experiment in the exploration
of nature.
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers is based
on a boat trip Thoreau took with his brother in 1839
from Concord, Massachusetts, to Concord, New
Hampshire. Ten years in the writing (it w as the book
he retired to Walden to work on) and incorporating
essays, passages from his journal, and some of his best
poems, it i s a superbly crafted achievement, its texture
enriched by the idealism of the Transcendentalists,
the delighted word-play of an imaginative linguist,
the individualism of a young American, and the
earthiness of a lover of nature.
Walden is a personal declaration of independence, a
social experiment, and a voyage of spiritual discovery,
set within the seasonal cycle of a year's "Life in the
Woods? "Simplify, simplify" is the beat of its "more
distant drummer"-to abandon waste and illusion, to
get to the bottom of life's essential needs, and to
practice a new economy for humane living. Its witty
and pointed rhetoric brings together language and
nature, the human and non-human in unusual con-
junctions that resonate with symbolic meanings. A
manual of self-reliance as well as a masterpiece of
style, it is one of the most fervently loved classics of
American literature.
The Maine Woods is an account of three trips taken by
boat and canoe in 1846, 1853, and 1857 through an
unexplored interior bypassed by westward expansion.
mm K27.50
f fin1 1 1 n ifc
BOSTON
PUBLIC
LIBRARY

Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2012
http://archive.org/details/weekonconcordandOOthor

HENRY DAVID THOREAU