Here, in one volume for the first time, are the most important works of Henry David Thoreau, America's greatest nature writer and a political thinker of worldwide influence. A landmark in American literature, Walden is at once a personal declaration of independence, a social experiment, a manual of self-reliance, and a masterpiece of style. The Maine Woods combines close observation of the unexplored Maine wilderness with a far-sighted plea for conservation. Including "Civil Disobedience," "Walking," and "Life Without Principle," the 27 essays gathered here reflect Thoreau's speculative and probing cast of mind. In his poems, presented here in versions from his journals and manuscripts, Thoreau gave voice to his private sentiments and spiritual aspirations in the plain style of New England speech.

A collection of essential writings features Thoreau's poetry and essays on nature, materialism, conformity, and politics; including such works as "Slavery in Massachusetts," "Civil Disobedience," "A Winter Walk," and "Life Without Principle."

Summer and winter our eyes had rested on the dim outline of the mountains in our horizon, to which distance and indistinctness lent a grandeur not their own, so that they served equally to interpret all the allusions of poets and travellers; whether with Homer, on a spring morning, we sat down on the many-peaked Olympus, or, with Virgil and his compeers, roamed the Etrurian and Thessalian hills, or with Humboldt measured the more modern Andes and Teneriffe. Thus we spoke our mind to them, standing on the Concord cliffs.

"[The author] traces the full arc of Thoreau’s life, from his early days in the intellectual hothouse of Concord, when the American experiment still felt fresh and precarious, and 'America was a family affair, earned by one generation and about to pass to the next.' By the time he died in 1862, at only forty-four years of age, Thoreau had witnessed the transformation of his world from a community of farmers and artisans into a bustling, interconnected commercial nation. What did that portend for the contemplative individual and abundant, wild nature that Thoreau celebrated? Drawing on Thoreau’s copious writings, published and unpublished, [the author] presents a Thoreau vigorously alive in all his quirks and contradictions: the young man shattered by the sudden death of his brother; the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."--