Authors: Henry David Thoreau, H. Daniel Peck (Introduction), H. Daniel Peck
ISBN-13: 9780140434422, ISBN-10: 0140434429
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
Date Published: December 1998
Edition: Reprint
"How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live," Henry David Thoreau once observed. The American poet, essayist and philosopher certainly held himself to that standard -- living out the tenets of Transcendentalism, recounting the experience in his masterpiece, Walden (1854), and passionately advocating human rights and civil liberties in the famous essay, Civil Disobedience (1849).
Henry D. Thoreau's classic A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers is published now as a new paperback edition and includes an introduction by noted writer John McPhee. This work--unusual for its symbolism and structure, its criticism of Christian institutions, and its many-layered storytelling--was Thoreau's first published book.In the late summer of 1839, Thoreau and his older brother John made a two-week boat-and-hiking trip from Concord, Massachusetts, to the White Mountains of New Hampshire. After John's sudden death in 1842, Thoreau began to prepare a memorial account of their excursion. He wrote two drafts of this story at Walden Pond, which he continued to revise and expand until 1849, when he arranged for its publication at his own expense. The book's heterodoxy and apparent formlessness troubled its contemporary audience. Modern readers, however, have come to see it as an appropriate predecessor to Walden, with Thoreau's story of a river journey depicting the early years of his spiritual and artistic growth.
Introduction | ix | |
Concord River | 5 | |
Saturday | 15 | |
Sunday | 43 | |
Monday | 117 | |
Tuesday | 179 | |
Wednesday | 235 | |
Thursday | 298 | |
Friday | 334 | |
Index | 395 |