In 1839, two years after graduating from Harvard, Henry David Thoreau and his older brother, John, took a boat-and-hiking trip from Concord, Massachusetts, to the White Mountains of New Hampshire. After John’s sudden death in 1842, Thoreau began to prepare a memorial account of their excursion during his stay at Walden Pond. Modern readers have come to see Thoreau’s story of the river journey as an appropriate predecessor to Walden, depicting the early years of his spiritual and artistic growth.

Just as the current of the stream bears along the boat with Thoreau and his brother, so the current of ideas in his mind bears along the reader by evoking the joy and nostalgia that Thoreau feels for those lost, golden days. As Thoreau says, human life is very much like a river running always downward to the sea, and in this book we enter for a moment the flow of Thoreau’s unique existence.”–Masterplots

Compiled from magazine articles published in the 1850s after his death, Cape Cod details several short trips Thoreau made to “the bare and bended arm ofMassachusetts” between 1849 and 1855. “He went to the Cape out of curiosity,” explains Paul Theroux, “but in the course of his travel a great thing happened: Thoreau, the woodsman and landlubber, discovered the sea.”

Encounters with the ocean dominate the book, from the fatal shipwreck of the opening episode to the late reflections on the Pilgrims’ Cape Cod landing and reconnaissance. Along the way, Thoreau relates the experiences of fishermen and oystermen, lighthouse keepers and ship captains, and their chronicles of exploration, settlement, and survival on the Cape against the threats of the wild sea and of encroaching modernity.

American author, poet, and philosopher Henry David Thoreau was a passionate abolitionist. Inspired by his opposition to slavery, his illuminating essay “Civil Disobedience” presents the theory that “the government is best that governs least.” A powerful testament that remains as important today as it was during its conception, this theory argues that citizens should not allow their government to overrule through taxes and unjust laws.

Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience – his protest against the government’s interference with civil liberty – has inspired many to embrace his philosophy of individualism and love of nature. First published in 1849, this essay argues that individuals have rights and duties in relation to their government. Motivated by his disgust over both slavery and the Mexican-American War, Thoreau argued that individuals must not permit nor enable their government to act against their own consciences. More than a century and a half later, his message is more timely than ever.

Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” is a political treatise against slavery, war, and an argument that individuals not cede excessive power to government.

A masterpiece of American individualism, the essay is considered by many to be one of the most important pieces of political and philosophical writings ever produced by an American.

Thoreau wrote the essay because of his opposition to slavery and the Mexican-American War. When the government engages in actions that are unjust, he believed that citizens should completely withdraw their support of the government and stop paying taxes, even if it results in imprisonment or violence.

People who said they have been influenced by Civil Disobedience include Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., President John F. Kennedy, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, suffragist Alice Paul, and authors Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, Ernest Hemingway, Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis, and William Butler Yeats.

The Maine Woods’ is based on Henry David Thoreau’s lengthy experiences in the forests of Maine in the years 1846, 1853, and 1857. Thoreau describes the area in exquisite detail: the native people and their languages, the loggers and their labors, the rivers, the trees, the plants and the birds. Experiencing all the joys of the woods, he padded in a canoe, climbed hills and tried the local foods. The journey also makes him contemplative of his own weaknesses and strengths. ‘The Maine Woods’ is an engaging narrative which paints an unforgettable picture of this beautiful landscape.

The timeless wisdom of two of America’s most celebrated philosophers is captured in this anthology containing selections from Thoreau’s Walden and On the Duty of Civil Disobedience and Emerson’s Introduction to Thoreau, Self-Reliance, Nature, The American Scholar, Education, and Politics. The distinguished voice of Russ Barnett brings the great works of Thoreau and Emerson alive for us today.

Walden is the classic account of two years spent by Henry David Thoreau living at Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts. The story is detailed in its accounts of Thoreau’s day-to-day activities, observations, and undertakings to survive out in the wilderness for two years. Thoreau’s journal is an exquisite account of a man seeking a more simple life by living in harmony with nature. In today’s fast-paced consumer-driven society, the austere lifestyle endorsed by Thoreau is as relevant and refreshing as ever.

Walden was frst published in 1854 by American transcendentalist writer Henry David Thoreau. The text is a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings. The work is part personal declaration of independence, social experiment, voyage of spiritual discovery, satire, and—to some degree—a manual for self-reliance.
Produced by Devin Lawerence
Edited by Macc Kay
Production executive Avalon Giuliano
ICON Intern Eden Giuliano
Music By AudioNautix With Their Kind Permission
©2020 Eden Garret Giuliano (P) Eden Garret Giuliano
Geoffrey Giuliano is the author of over thirty internationally bestselling biographies, including the London Sunday Times bestseller Blackbird: The Life and Times of Paul McCartney and Dark Horse: The Private Life of George Harrison. He can be heard on the Westwood One Radio Network and has written and produced over seven hundred original spoken-word albums and video documentaries on various aspects of popular culture. He is also a well known movie actor.

An experiment. A declaration. A spiritual awakening. Noted transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau spent two years, two months and two days chronicling his near-isolation in a small cabin he built in the woods near Walden Pond, on land owned by his mentor and the father of Transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Immersing himself in nature and solitude, Thoreau sought to develop a greater understanding of society amidst a life of self-reliance and simplicity. Originally published in 1854, Walden remains one of the most celebrated works in American literature. Also includes Walden’s essay, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.

In the early spring of 1845, Henry David Thoreau built and lived in a cabin near the shore of Walden Pond in rural Massachusetts. For the next two years, he enacted his own Transcendentalist experiment, living a simple life based on self-reliance, individualism, and harmony with nature. The journal he kept at that time evolved into his masterwork,Walden, an eloquent expression of a uniquely American philosophy.

During the same period, Thoreau endured a one-day imprisonment for his refusal to pay a poll tax, an act of protest against the government for supporting the Mexican War, to which he was morally opposed. In his essay “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,” he defends the principles of such nonviolent protest, setting an example that has influenced such figures as Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., and that endures to this day.

Henry David Thoreau is today considered one of the most influential figures in American thought and literature.

En 1845, l’écrivain et philosophe Henry David Thoreau, se retire seul pour deux ans et 2 mois, en pleine nature dans une cabane de sa confection. De cette expérience il concevra un récit introspectif au fil des saisons qui deviendra un grand classique de la littérature américaine. Je gagnai les bois parce que je voulais vivre suivant mûre réflexion, n’affronter que les actes essentiels de la vie, et voir si je ne pourrais apprendre ce qu’elle avait à enseigner, non pas, quand je viendrais à mourir, découvrir que je n’avais pas vécu. Henry David Thoreau

In 1845, noted transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau spent two years, two months, and two days chronicling his near-isolation in the small cabin he built in the woods near Walden Pond on land owned by his mentor, the father of Transcendentalism, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Shedding the trivial ties that he felt bound much of humanity, Thoreau reaped from the land both physically and mentally, and pursued truth in the quiet of nature. In Walden, he explains how separating oneself from the world of men can truly awaken the sleeping self. Thoreau holds fast to the notion that you have not truly existed until you adopt such a lifestyle-and only then can you reenter society, as an enlightened being. Originally published in 1854, Walden remains one of the most celebrated works in American literature.

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.” And so it began. Henry David Thoreau, at twenty-seven, built a tiny, one-room cabin in the woods–on land owned by his friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson–and began his two-year experiment in frugality on the shore of Walden Pond. He wasn’t seeking isolation so much as simplicity, to “live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”

This book is his account of his time spent there. And yet it is so much more.

A keen observer, Thoreau is challenging, opinionated, funny, and sharp. E. B. White said of him, “Henry went forth to battle when he took to the woods, and Walden is the report of a man torn by two powerful and opposing drives–the desire to enjoy the world and the urge to set the world straight.”

First published in 1854, these essays on politics, philosophy, humanity, and the natural world are at once deeply personal and strikingly universal. He writes with drive, hope, and frustration, with quick humor and exacting honesty. He is an astonishingly good writer. And his words and insights will stay with you long after the last page.

A meandering ode to the simple act and accomplished art of taking a walk. Profound and humorous, companionable and curmudgeonly. Walking, by America’s first nature writer, is your personal and portable guide to the activity that, like no other, awakens the senses and soul to the ‘absolute freedom and wildness’ of nature.