Learn more about CCRLS
Reading recommendations from Novelist
Cover image for Henry David Thoreau : a life
Format:
Book
Title:
Henry David Thoreau : a life
ISBN:
9780226344690

9780226599373
Publication:
Chicago, IL : The University of Chicago Press, [2017]
Physical Description:
xx, 615 pages, 32 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm
Contents:
Preface -- Introduction : Land of the grass-ground river. Tahatawan's Arrowhead ; Enclosures and commons ; The genesis of Musketaquid ; The coming of the English ; Living the revolution -- Part I. The making of Thoreau. Chapter one. Concord sons and daughters ; Coming to Concord ; The early years of John and Cynthia Thoreau ; Making Concord home ; Chapter two. Higher learning from Concord to Harvard (1826-1837) ; A Concord Education ; A Harvard portrait ; Learning to leave Harvard ; Chapter three. Transcendental apprentice (1837-1841) ; Sic Vita ; Transcendental self-culture ; Concord social culture ; The Thoreau school ; "There is no remedy for love but to love more" ; Compensations ; Chapter four. "Not till we are lost" (1842-1844) ; The death of John Thoreau ; "Surely joy is the condition of life!" New friends, new ventures ; Thoreau on Staten Island ; The road to Walden -- Part II. The making of Walden. Chapter five. "Walden, is that you? (1845-1847) ; Preparations ; On Walden Pond : the first season ; Going to extremes I : Thoreau in jail ; Going to extremes II : Thoreau on Katahdin ; Leaving Walden ; Chapter six . A writer's life (1847-1849) ; "Will you be my father?" Thoreau at the Emersons' ; "Lectures multiply on my desk" : Thoreau finds his audience ; "Civil disobedience" ; A basket of delicate texture : weaving Thoreau's week ; Chapter seven. From Concord to Cosmos : Thoreau's turn to science (1849-1851) ; "The law which reveals" : Cape Cod ; "Even this may be the year" : 1850 ; "The captain of a huckleberry party" ; Chapter eight. The beauty of nature, the baseness of men (1851-1854). Abolition and reform after the Fugitive Slave Law ; The hermit at home ; The higher law from Chesuncook to "Walden" ; Reading "Walden" -- Part III. Successions. Chapter nine. Walden-on-main (1847-1857) ; "What shall it profit?" : Thoreau after "Walden" ; Illness and recovery ; "The infinite extent of our relations" ; Chapter ten. Wild fruits (1857-1859). The last excursions to Cape Cod and the Maine woods ; Life in the commons : village, mountain, river ; "A transcendentalist above all" : Thoreau and John Brown ; Chapter eleven. A constant new creation (1860-1862). The year of Darwin ; "The West of which I speak" : Thoreau's last journey ; "The leaves teach us how to die."
Summary:
"Walden. Yesterday I came here to live." That entry from the journal of Henry David Thoreau, and the intellectual journey it began, would by themselves be enough to place Thoreau in the American pantheon. His attempt to "live deliberately" in a small woods at the edge of his hometown of Concord has been a touchstone for individualists and seekers since the publication of Walden in 1854. But there was much more to Thoreau than his brief experiment in living at Walden Pond. A member of the vibrant intellectual circle centered on his neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson, he was also an ardent naturalist, a manual laborer and inventor, a radical political activist, and more. Many books have taken up various aspects of Thoreau's character and achievements, but, as Laura Dassow Walls writes, "Thoreau has never been captured between covers; he was too quixotic, mischievous, many-sided." Two hundred years after his birth, and two generations after the last full-scale biography, Walls renews Henry David Thoreau for us in all his profound, inspiring complexity. Drawing on Thoreau's copious writings, published and unpublished, Walls presents a Thoreau vigorously alive, full of quirks and contradictions: the young man shattered by the sudden death of his brother; the ambitious Harvard College student; the ecstatic visionary who closed Walden with an account of the regenerative power of the Cosmos. We meet the man whose belief in human freedom and the value of labor made him an uncompromising abolitionist; the solitary walker who found society in nature, but also found his own nature in the society of which he was a deeply interwoven part. And, running through it all, Thoreau the passionate naturalist, who, long before the age of environmentalism, saw tragedy for future generations in the human heedlessness around him. "The Thoreau I sought was not in any book, so I wrote this one," says Walls. The result is a Thoreau unlike any seen since he walked the streets of Concord, a Thoreau for our time and all time.--Dust jacket.
Geographic Term:
Holds: