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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 818.309
EAN num: 9781883011956
ISBN number: 1883011957
Label: Library of America
Manufacturer: Library of America
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 703
Printing Date: April 23, 2001
Publishing house: Library of America
Release Date: April 19, 2001
Sale Popularity Level: 70555
Studio: Library of America
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America's greatest nature writer and a political thinker of worldwide impact, Henry David Thoreau's remarkable essays reflect his speculative and probing cast of mind. In his poems, he gave voice to his private sentiments and spiritual aspirations in the plain style of New England speech. Now, The Library of America brings together these indispensable works in one authoritative volume.
Spanning his entire career, the 27 essays gathered here vary in style from the ambling rhythm of 'Natural History of Massachusetts' and 'A Winter Walk'to the concentrated moral outrage of 'Slavery in Massachusetts' and 'A Plea for Captain John Brown.' Included are 'Civil Disobedience,' Thoreau's great exploration of the conflict between individual conscience and state power that continues to influence political thinkers and activists; 'Walking,' a meditation on wildness and civilization; and 'Life Without Principle,'a passionate critique of American materialism and conformity. Also here are literary essays, including pieces on Homer, Chaucer, and Carlyle; the travel essay 'A Yankee in Canada'; the three speeches in defense of John Brown; and essays such as 'Autumnal Tints,' 'Wild Fruits,' and 'Huckleberries' that explore natural phenomena around Concord.
Seven poems are published here for the very first time, and others are presented in new, previously unpublished versions based on Thoreau's manuscripts.
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Rated by buyers -
Henry David Thoreau, born in Concord, Massachusetts, on July 12, 1817, was one of the co-founders and most influential representatives of the philosophical school known as "Transcendentalism." (Others include fellow Concord residents Ralph Waldo Emerson and Bronson Alcott, reformist teacher and father of Louisa May Alcott.) Thoreau's life centered around his home town; yet, as his writings reflect, he was very familiar with all major philosophical schools of his time, not only those developing in America but also the writings of Kant, Goethe, Schiller and Hegel - indeed, the very term "transcendentalist" derives, as Emerson explained, from Kant, who had very first recognized intuitive thought as a kind of thought in its own right, holding "that there was a very important class of ideas ... which did not come by experience, but through which experience was acquired ... [and which] were intuitions of the mind itself." These were the ideas which Kant had called "transcendental forms." (Or, as Thoreau himself once put it in his Journal: "I should have told them at once that I was a transcendentalist. That would have been the shortest way of telling them that they would not understand my explanations.")
To this day, transcendentalist philosophy, and Thoreau's work in particular, has proven enormously influential - on the program of the British Labour Party as much as on people as diverse as spiritual leaders Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. on the one hand and rock star Don Henley on the other hand. Henley in the 1990s even went so far as to found the Walden Woods Project, teaming up with the Thoreau Society to preserve as much as possible of Walden Woods and the land around Concord, and foster education about Thoreau. Yet, during his life time only few of his many works, now considered so influential, were published, and even those did not find wide distribution. "I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself," he commented on the poor sales of his "Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers."
This collection, one of two Library of America volumes dedicated to Thoreau's works and edited by renowned Thoreau scholar Elizabeth Hall Witherell, presents the majority of his essays and poems, from well-known works such as "Civil Disobedience," "Life Without Principle" and "Walking" to a large body of lesser known (but just as quotable!) writings and loving observations of nature ("Autumnal Tints," "Wild Apples," "Huckleberries"). A companion volume, edited by Robert F. Sayre, contains Thoreau's four longest publications ("A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers," "The Maine Woods," "Cape Cod" and, of course, "Walden") - thus omitting from the Library of America series only his extensive journals and the posthumously published "Faith in a Seed," a collection of four manuscripts left partially unfinished at Thoreau's death in 1862 and published for the very first time in the late 1990s, to much fanfare among Thoreauvians the world over.
Introspective to a fault, the man who once built a cabin on Walden Pond and for over two years lived the life of a hermit, was also a keen observer; of nature as much as of the world surrounding him. The shallowness and greed he saw in so-called "civil" society filled him with skepticism ("intellectual and moral suicide," he scoffed in "Life Without Principle") - and with the tireless need to encourage free thinking and personal independence. "I wish to speak a word for Nature," he thus opened his essay on "Walking," and explained that he sought to make a point in favor of "absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil, - to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society." And he went on to mourn the fact that few people were truly able to walk and travel freely, to leave behind the social bounds that tied them down, and to open up to nature's beauty. This, of course, echoed his famous statements in "Walden" that "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation;" that however, as he had learned by his "experiment" on Walden Pond, "if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a sucess unexpected in common hours." And this was the same spirit who, staunchly opposed to both slavery and to the Mexican War, would rather spend a night in jail than pay his taxes, and who summed up his posture in "Civil Disobedience" by saying that "I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right" - a statement echoed roughly a hundred years later when Mahatma Gandhi told an English court that he believed that "non-cooperation with evil is a duty and British rule of India is evil," and also resonating through the publications of many an American ... Read More
Rated by buyers -
This is a very fine collection of Essays and Poems but a bit pricey. I have to think that Thoreau would not have approved. Go to the library and paw through some of the essays
to see if you want the ones that you cannot get through another
collection. Frequently "Walking" or "Civil Disobedience" or
"Life Without Principle" are added to small volumes of Walden.
I, of course, shelled out the cash and bought it, but I
sometimes have second thoughts. The paper is quite thin and
I have doubts about it's durablity. If you intend to read this
work several times while underlining and making notes, I would look aroung before buying this specific volume. If you merely want a presentable copy to sit on the shelves and only occasionally consulted, but otherwise dormant-than this is for you.
As a side note, Thoreau demonstrates that some mediums are
better for others. Although a master prose essay writer( I see
"Walden" a a collection of discrete, connected essays) his
poetry isn't so great. This is not uncommon, although a great
prose-poet, Nietzsche's straight poetry is very weak.
Essentially, the material inside this volume is worth your
money. This volume itself may not satisfy your needs though.
Go to a university library, read through the essays, and decide
how important ownership is for you. Thoreau would have approved
of such an investigation.
Rated by buyers -
....When beginning to read this anthology, I was already familiar with most of his essays but had had only limited exposure to his poems which comprise about a third of this volume’s contents. Thoreau was a man of great intellectual courage while possessing at the same time an uncommon sensitivity to the natural world in which he seemed to be most comfortable. Within the context of American society during the mid-19th century, it is interesting to observe his development of concepts such as civil disobedience which later had such a profound influence on the thinking of public leaders such as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. I have always admired the rigour of Thoreau’s intellect which is evident in abundance throughout his published works. While proceeding through this single volume in which most of his essays and his poems are arranged in sequence, I developed a much greater appreciation of (for lack of a better term) his “humanity.” Those who desire a wider and deeper context for consideration of these works are urged to read Walter Harding's The Days of Henry Thoreau as well as Robert D. Richardson’s two biographies, Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind and Emerson: The Mind on Fire.
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