Walden

Walden

On the morning of July 4, 1845, Henry David Thoreau walked a mile and a half from the center of Concord, Massachusetts, into a stand of second-growth pines on the northern shore of Walden Pond. He had a borrowed axe, a handful of tools, and the frame of a cabin he had been raising since March. He moved in that Independence Day. The cabin was ten feet wide and fifteen feet long -- smaller than most prison cells, about the size of a parking space. Total construction cost: $28.12 and one half cent. He itemized every nail in the book that would follow nine years later.

Thoreau was twenty-seven years old. He was a Harvard graduate, a former schoolteacher, a pencil-maker, a land surveyor, and a close friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson, on whose land he was now squatting. He was not running away. He was running toward something he could not yet name but suspected was buried under the noise of ordinary American life -- under the buying and selling, the scrambling, the endless anxious effort to appear prosperous. He wanted to find out what was strictly necessary. He wanted to discover what a human life was actually for.

He stayed for two years, two months, and two days. He left on September 6, 1847. The book he wrote about it -- seven drafts, nine years of revision -- was published on August 9, 1854, under the full title "Walden; or, Life in the Woods." It sold modestly. The reviews were mixed. Thoreau died of tuberculosis in 1862, at forty-four, famous mainly in Concord, not yet recognized as one of the most important writers America had produced.

Then the world caught up to him.