Walden, and Civil Disobedience

In 1845 Henry David Thoreau, one of the principal New England Transcendentalists, left the small town of Concord for the country. Beside the lake of Walden he built himself a log cabin and returned to nature to observe and reflect—while surviving on eight dollars a year. From this experience emerged Walden, one of the great classics of American literature and a deeply personal reaction against the commercialism and materialism that Thoreau saw as the main impulses of mid-nineteenth-century America.

Here also is Civil Disobedience, Thoreau’s essay on just resistance to government that not only challenged the establishment of his day but has been used as a flag for later campaigners from Mahatma Gandhi to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.