Narrative
Walden
Henry David Thoreau · 1854
Opening lines
When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only.
Text quoted from gutenberg.org
Synopsis
A man settles alone in a cabin he has built beside a pond, a mile and a half from the village. He notes what the boards, the nails and the beans cost him and what his days of labour bring in, plants, fishes, sounds the pond through the ice to measure its depth, receives visitors. The book arranges his stay on the cycle of a year, from summer to the thaw of spring, and each part moves from a concrete act to a question about how other men spend their lives.
Context
The stay lasts two years and two months, from 4 July 1845 to 6 September 1847, on land bought by Ralph Waldo Emerson, less than three kilometres from the village, where its author sometimes returned to dine and have his laundry done. The book does not follow this order: it reduces the two years to one and arranges them on the cycle of the seasons. Begun during the stay, the text went through seven successive versions until 1854; it is a construction and not a record. The first printing, two thousand copies, took five years to sell.
Who it is for
A long narrative, in eighteen thematic sections that can be read separately. The reader looking in it for a hermit's diary will be disappointed.
Prizes and reception
Well received by critics but slow to sell, it became a reference only after its author's death; it has since been translated into dozens of languages.
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