In 1845 Henry David Thoreau disdainful of America's growing commercialism and industrialism
left his home town of Concord Massachusetts to begin a new life alone in a rough hut on the
north-west shore of Walden Pond. Walden is Thoreau's classic autobiographical account of this
experiment in solitary living. 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.
