Walden: 150th Anniversary Edition (Princeton Classics, 20) - Softcover

"Walden is a self-help book, perhaps the ultimate self-help book, urging us to show up for our own lives, to have the courage to find our own convictions and to try to live them out... [Thoreau is] a writer of immense humanity, vitality and humor... One hundred fifty years after its publication, Walden also remains a practical, usable manual on how to lead a good, and just life... At its core, Walden is about the project of personal freedom, self-emancipation, which is where all pursuits of freedom must start."--Robert D. Richardson, Smithsonian Magazine "Each [volume] is preceded by a substantive, lively and idiosyncratic essay... Together, the essays are a mini-course in Thoreau and the trends he launched in American thought."--Nancy Szokan, Washington Post Book World

One of the most influential and compelling books in American literature, Walden is a vivid account of the years that Henry D. Thoreau spent alone in a secluded cabin at Walden Pond. This edition--introduced by noted American writer John Updike--celebrates the perennial importance of a classic work, originally published in 1854. Much of Walden's material is derived from Thoreau's journals and contains such engaging pieces from the lively "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For" and "Brute Neighbors" to the serene "Reading" and "The Pond in the Winter." Other famous sections involve Thoreau's visits with a Canadian woodcutter and with an Irish family, a trip to Concord, and a description of his bean field. This is the complete and authoritative text of Walden--as close to Thoreau's original intention as all available evidence allows. This is the authoritative text of Walden and the ideal presentation of Thoreau's great document of social criticism and dissent.