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
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.
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.
Henry David Thoreau 1854