The Illustrated Walden: Or, Life in the Woods | Henry David Thoreau

A beautiful illustrated edition of Thoreau’s classic treatise on man and nature.

“Our life is frittered away by detail. . . . Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!”

About the book

Henry David Thoreau built his small cabin on the shore of Walden Pond in 1845. For the next two years, he lived there as simply as possible, learning to eliminate the unnecessary material and spiritual details that intrude upon human happiness. Thoreau described his experiences in Walden, using vivid, forceful prose that transforms his reflections on nature into richly evocative metaphors. In a world obsessed with technology and luxury, this American classic about seeking “the essential facts of life” seems more relevant today than ever. This beautiful, fully illustrated edition of Walden brings a rarely seen visual and artistic dimension to Thoreau’s philosophical masterpiece.

This illustrated edition of Walden features 66 photographs by Herbert W. Gleason, one of the great American landscape photographers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Gleason, who had a special love for what he called ‘the simple beauty of New England’, became interested in Thoreau’s work when commissioned in 1906 by the Houghton Mifflin Company to illustrate their edition of ‘The Writings of Henry David Thoreau’. With the help of the few surviving people who had known Thoreau, Gleason searched out the exact places Thoreau had described – all of them still looking much as they had when Thoreau knew them – and photographed them.

Publication date: March 06, 2018

About the Author

In March 1845, Henry David Thoreau built himself a wooden hut on the edge of Walden Pond, near Concord, MA, where he lived until September 1847. Walden is Thoreau’s autobiographical account of his Robinson Crusoe existence, bare of creature comforts but rich in contemplation of the wonders of nature and the ways of man.

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