"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

"Walden; or, Life in the Woods" has been read by virtually every college student in America for the last 75 years, has been published in over 200 English editions and translated into over 50 languages. From July 4, 1845 to September, 1847, Henry David Thoreau lived in a cabin on the edge of Walden Pond, near Concord Massachusetts. Guided by his maxim "live life simply," he set strict rules regarding how much he would spend, the possessions he would keep and the amount of contact he had with others. His goal was simple: "To live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach." The results have provided a timeless relevancy of thought about how a life could be lived.

He produced only two books, "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers," a story of a canoe trip he took with his brother which was published in 1849, and "Walden; or, Life in the Woods," published in 1862. For a writer with only two published books who was only 44 years old when he died, Thoreau left a legacy of unique writing, thinking, philosophizing, and behaving that has resulted in endless debate over his principled thoughts on such areas as civil disobedience, environmentalism, social activism, abolition, creative self reliance and many more.

Thoreau was a complex man who was associated with the Concord-based literary movement called New England Transcendentalism. The group included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and George Ripley. He embraced the Transcendentalist belief in the universality of creation and the primacy of personal insight and experience

In July 1846, Thoreau went into Concord and was arrested because he failed to pay a poll tax that had been assessed against every voter that was dedicated to payment of the Mexican-American War. Rather than pay, Thoreau spent a night in jail. Thoreau made clear his position in what is likely his most famous essay, "Civil Disobedience." In this essay Thoreau discussed passive resistance as a method of protest. Thoreau's decision to indulge in Civil Disobedience depended to a large extent on his belief in the reliability of the human conscience, a fundamental Transcendentalist principle.

At his death in 1862, he left thousands of manuscripts pages including his voluminous personal journal which he carefully wrote from 1837 to 1861. His sister Sophia as well as members of the Transcendental group produced several book titles in the 1860's from his manuscripts but scholars considered them highly flawed. By 1906 his original manuscript materials were dispersed into three sections, two of which went into the collector market, the third going to a national publisher. It took into the 2000's before the documentation of location of all the manuscript pages was completed. Through the combined efforts of several universities and federal government agency''s, a work entitled "The Thoreau Edition" is being created that accounts for all of Thoreau's work and is prepared in the manner and style Thoreau used in its original creation.

Frame : 1" black, wood, sculpted, Outside size : 13 7/8" x 18 1/4"

All images are housed in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress

Price: $115.00

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Product #: FR0127