Walden

In 1845 Henry David Thoreau left his home town of Concord, Massachusetts to begin a new life alone, in a rough hut he built himself on the northwest shore of Walden Pond. "Walden" is Thoreau's autobiographical account of this experiment in solitary living, his refusal to play by the rules of hard work and the accumulation of wealth, and above all, the freedom to adapt his living to the natural world around him.This new edition of "Walden" traces the sources of Thoreau's reading and thinking and situates the author in his birthplace and his sense of its history - social, economic and natural.

In addition, an ecological appendix provides modern identifications of the myriad plants and animals to which Thoreau gave increasingly close attention as he became acclimatized to his life in the woods by Walden Pond.