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Work · Pragmatism & US Philosophy

Walden

1854 · by Henry David Thoreau

Two years in a cabin by a pond: I wished to live deliberately.

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Introduction

On 4 July 1845 Thoreau moved into a cabin he had built himself on land owned by Emerson at Walden Pond near Concord; he stayed two years and two months. Walden, published in 1854 after several rewritings, compresses this stay into the cycle of a single year, from summer to spring. Its eighteen chapters combine exact accounts of his expenses (the cabin cost him about 28 dollars), observations of the pond, animals and seasons, and a sharp critique of a society in which people wear themselves out to acquire what they do not need. Received modestly at first, the book later became a classic of American literature and of environmental thought.

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  • Nature1836 · Ralph Waldo Emerson

More works by Henry David Thoreau

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