This Library of America edition collects for the first time in one volume the four full-length works in which Henry David Thoreau combined his poetic sensibility, classical learning, philosophical austerity, and Yankee love of practical detail into literary masterpieces on humanity’s communion with nature. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers is based on a boat trip Thoreau took with his brother in 1839 from Concord, Massachusetts, to Concord, New Hampshire. Ten years in the writing (it was the book he retired to Walden to work on) and incorporating essays, passages from his journal, and some of his best poems, it is a superbly crafted achievement, its texture enriched by the idealism of the Transcendentalists, the delighted wordplay of an imaginative linguist, the individualism of a young America, and the earthiness of a lover of nature. Walden is a personal declaration of independence, a social experiment, and a voyage of spiritual discovery, set within the seasonal cycle of a year’s “Life in the Woods.” “Simplify, simplify” is the beat of its “more distant drummer”—to abandon waste and illusion, to get to the bottom of life’s essential needs, and to practice a new economy for humane living. Its witty and pointed rhetoric brings together language and nature, the human and nonhuman in unusual conjunctions that resonate with symbolic meanings. A manual of self-reliance as well as a masterpiece of style, it is one of the most fervently loved classics of American literature. The Maine Woods is an account of three trips taken by boat and canoe in 1846, 1853, and 1857 through an unexplored interior bypassed by westward expansion. It describes the virgin rivers and forests of Maine, the customs of woodsmen and Indian guides, the hunting of moose, and the effects of the timber industry and encroaching settlement. An early and eloquent plea for conservation by a farsighted naturalist, its close observation of the American wild becomes an examination of “the motives which carry men into the wilderness.” Cape Cod is the bleakest of Thoreau’s works, resembling Melville’s prose in its vision of the titanic indifference of nature. Cape Cod appears as both ocean and desert, a vast expanse of shipwrecks and barren soil, peopled by hardy, weathered inhabitants who seem survivors from the age of the first Pilgrims. Based upon his own visits and upon accounts from the earliest times, it is an unsentimental study of human endurance in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

This carefully crafted ebook: “Journeys, Adventures & Life in Harmony with Nature – 6 Book Collection (Illustrated)” is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents: “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers” is a narrative of a 2 week boat trip from Concord, Massachusetts, down the Concord River to the Middlesex Canal, to the Merrimack River, up to Concord, New Hampshire, and back, taken by Thoreau and his brother John. It covers diverse topics such as religion, poetry, and history, which Thoreau relates to his own life experiences. “Walden” details Thoreau's experiences over the course of two years, two months, and two days in a cabin he built in the woods near Walden Pond, Massachusetts. The book is a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings. “The Maine Woods” is a collection of accounts of 3 different trips Thoreau took to wilds of Maine, unified by his increasing fascination with the primitive world and the "wild," both environmental and psychological. “Cape Cod” is an account based on a few trips Thoreau took to Cape Cod. It depicts a journey through the dismal, deserted, unpopulated wasteland that was Cape Cod in the early 1850s, describing both the landscape and the rugged people who lived in it. “A Yankee in Canada” is an excursion book about Thoreau's journey to the region of Montréal and Québec in the Fall of 1850. “Canoeing” in the Wilderness is the record of the canoe trip through Main Woods. It is vast tract of almost virgin woodland, peopled only with a few loggers and pioneer farmers, Indians, and wild animals. Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was an American essayist, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, surveyor, and historian. A leading transcendentalist, Thoreau is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay Civil Disobedience, an argument for disobedience to an unjust state.