Walden & civil obedience

No nineteenth-century American writer can claim to be as modern as Henry David Thoreau.  His central preoccupations x2013; the illusory nature of much of what we call x2018;progress x2019;, the proper symbiotic relationship between man and the natural environment, the limitations of government, especially where it seeks to intrude on the personal, the moral and political case for non-violence,  the dubious pleasures of material comforts, our intoxication with excess, our unrelenting search for the x2018;rules x2019; by which we might live our lives x2013; these, and many other matters are as real to us now as they were to Thoreau in 1845 when he began his experiment in self-sufficiency.  Walden is his autobiographical record of his life of relative isolation at Walden Pond, some twenty miles west of the city of Boston, but it is also a work of detailed natural history and the expression of a philosophy of life by a deeply poetic sensibility.  His essay (originally a lecture), x2018;Civil Disobedience x2019;, has over the 150 or so years since its publication exerted an enormous influence, animating thinkers such as Leo Tolstoy and Mohandas Gandhi as well as political movements such as the British Labour Party, the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, and various forms of oppositional activism across the globe.

Walden and x2018;Civil Disobedience x2019; are reprinted here in a new edition alongside three of Thoreau x2019;s seminal essays, x2018;Slavery in Massachusetts x2019;, x2018;A Plea for Captain John Brown x2019;, and x2018;Life Without Principle x2019;.   Henry Claridge x2019;s introduction illuminates the extent to which Thoreau x2019;s writings and his thinking were a response to the dramatic changes wrought by the physical expansion of the United States and the migration of European peoples across the American sub-continent in the first half of the nineteenth-century. The edition also comes with a bibliography and extensive explanatory notes.