The Transcendentalists' faith in nature was tested by Thoreau between 18 when he lived for twenty-six months in a homemade hut at Walden Pond. Inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau became a key member of the Transcendentalist movement that included Margaret Fuller and Bronson Alcott. He graduated from Harvard in 1837, the same year he began his lifelong Journal. Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1817. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. With more than 1,800 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Both give rewarding insight into a free-minded, principled and idiosyncratic life.įor more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world.

Civil Disobedience, also included in this volume, expresses his antislavery and antiwar sentiments, and has influenced resistance movements worldwide.

But Thoreau's embrace of solitude and simplicity did not entail a withdrawal from social and political matters. Walden, the account of his stay near Walden Pond, conveys at once a naturalists wonder at the commonplace and a transcendentalists yearning for spiritual truth and self-reliance.

A transcendentalist classic on social responsibility and a manifesto that inspired modern protest movementsĬritical of 19th-century Americas booming commercialism and industrialism, Henry David Thoreau moved to a small cabin in the woods of Concord, Massachusetts in 1845.

Thoreau walden and civil disobedience