In 1845 Henry David Thoreau left his home town of Concord, Massachusetts to
begin a new life alone, in a rough hut he built himself a mile and a half away
on the north-west shore of Walden Pond. Walden is Thoreau`s classic
autobiographical account of this experiment in solitary living, his refusal to
play by the rules of hard work and the accumulation of wealth and above all the
freedom it gave him to adapt his living to the natural world around him. This
new edition of Walden traces the sources of Thoreau`s reading and thinking and
considers the author in the context of his birthplace and his sense of its
history - social, economic and natural. In addition, an ecological appendix
provides modern identifications of the myriad plants and animals to which
Thoreau gave increasingly close attention as he became acclimatized to his life
in the woods by Walden Pond.