Walden, And On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience

Walden, and On the Duty of Civil Disobedience pairs Henry David Thoreau’s two most famous works in a single volume that has been published in many editions since his death in 1862. The combination has become standard in American editions of Thoreau because the two works represent the two central dimensions of his thought and reading them together gives a fuller picture of his work than either alone.

Walden, originally published in 1854, records Thoreau’s two-year experiment in living simply in a small cabin he built on the shore of Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts. He moved into the cabin on July 4, 1845 and stayed until September 1847, during which time he wrote the first draft of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and worked on what would eventually become the Walden book itself. The book is divided into chapters on various subjects including economy, where he lived and what he lived for, reading, sounds, solitude, visitors, the bean field, the village, the ponds, brute neighbors, house warming, former inhabitants and winter visitors, winter animals, the pond in winter, spring, and conclusion.

The book combines practical autobiography with substantial philosophical and literary content. The detailed account of how Thoreau actually lived at Walden, including the specific costs of building his cabin and growing his beans, sits alongside extended meditations on what human life is for and on how Americans of the mid-nineteenth century had organized themselves in ways that he considered fundamentally mistaken. The combination has produced a book that has been read in very different ways across the more than a century and a half since its publication, with substantial disagreement about how literally to take the practical example versus how figuratively to read the philosophical argument.

On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, originally published in 1849, addresses the related political question of what duties an individual citizen owes to an unjust government. The essay grew out of Thoreau’s refusal to pay his Massachusetts poll tax in protest against slavery and the Mexican War. The essay has been one of the most internationally influential American political documents and shaped both Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.

The combined volume runs about four hundred pages. It is essential reading in American literature and political thought.