A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers; Walder, or Life in the Woods; The Maine Woods; Cape Cod PDF
Preview A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers; Walder, or Life in the Woods; The Maine Woods; Cape Cod
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers Walden The Maine Woods Cape Cod HENRY DAVID THOREAU Collected for the first time in one volume, these are the four full-length works in which Thoreau com- bined his p oetic sensibility, classical learning, philo- sophical austerity, and Yankee love of practical detail into a lifelong literary experiment in the exploration of nature. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers is based on a boat trip Thoreau took with his brother in 1839 from Concord, Massachusetts, to Concord, New Hampshire. Ten years in the writing (it w as the book he retired to Walden to work on) and incorporating essays, passages from his journal, and some of his best poems, it i s a superbly crafted achievement, its texture enriched by the idealism of the Transcendentalists, the delighted word-play of an imaginative linguist, the individualism of a young American, and the earthiness of a lover of nature. Walden is a personal declaration of independence, a social experiment, and a voyage of spiritual discovery, set within the seasonal cycle of a year's "Life in the Woods? "Simplify, simplify" is the beat of its "more distant drummer"-to abandon waste and illusion, to get to the bottom of life's essential needs, and to practice a new economy for humane living. Its witty and pointed rhetoric brings together language and nature, the human and non-human in unusual con- junctions that resonate with symbolic meanings. A manual of self-reliance as well as a masterpiece of style, it is one of the most fervently loved classics of American literature. The Maine Woods is an account of three trips taken by boat and canoe in 1846, 1853, and 1857 through an unexplored interior bypassed by westward expansion. mm K27.50 f fin1 1 1 n ifc BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2012 http://archive.org/details/weekonconcordandOOthor HENRY DAVID THOREAU
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