Walden and On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

Henry David Thoreau 1854

A record of two years in a cabin beside a pond, paired with an essay on refusing unjust laws. Thoreau lists what his house cost to build, down to the half cent: $28.12½.

435 pages 8h 26m reading time

Why it lasts

  • A classic of American Transcendentalism and nature writing.
  • Draws on the two years Thoreau lived in a cabin he built at Walden Pond, urging a simple, deliberate life instead of chasing money and possessions.
  • Argues in "Civil Disobedience" that people of conscience should refuse to obey unjust laws.
  • That essay shaped the nonviolent resistance of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.
  • Thoreau's Walden helped inspire the environmental movement and the American tradition of nature writing.

Behind the book

  • One night in jail

    In 1846 Thoreau was jailed for refusing to pay a tax, and that night inspired his civil disobedience essay.

  • Freed against his will

    Someone, probably his aunt, paid the tax for him, and Thoreau was annoyed to be released the next morning.

  • Built on a friend's land

    His cabin stood on land owned by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, and he moved in on July 4, 1845.

  • Rewritten many times

    Thoreau worked on Walden for about seven years and revised it through roughly seven drafts before it was published.