Overview
Thoreau recounts his two years living simply in a cabin by Walden Pond, using the experience to reflect on self-reliance, nature, and the meaning of a well-lived life.
Thoreau spent two years, two months, and two days from 1845 to 1847 living alone in a cabin he built beside Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. Walden, published in 1854, is the record of that experiment. Thoreau was not as isolated as the book sometimes suggests — he walked into town most days and his mother did his laundry — but the book's argument about simplicity, deliberate living, and the costs of conformity is serious and has aged well.
Key Ideas
Simplify, simplify
Most of what we accumulate and busy ourselves with is unnecessary.
Live deliberately
Thoreau went to the woods to live intentionally and confront the essential facts of life.
Civil disobedience begins within
True freedom starts with thinking independently and questioning social norms.
Who should read this
Readers who have wondered whether they've accidentally signed up for a life of obligation and want to examine the deal. Thoreau is a better writer than his reputation as a moralist suggests; the prose in the 'Sounds' and 'Solitude' chapters is some of the finest in American literature.
Who might skip it
Skip if you want a travel memoir or a nature book — Walden is both, but more than either, it is an argument dressed in a memoir's clothing. Skip also if Thoreau's occasional priggishness is hard to tolerate; he can be sanctimonious about his neighbours' lives in a way modern readers often find grating.
The verdict
A book whose arguments I find more persuasive with each rereading. Thoreau's insistence that most of what we call necessities are habits or social pressures is uncomfortable now in the same way it was in 1854. The book's tone is confident to the point of rudeness; take that as the condition of reading it.
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life."
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
If you liked this
Civil Disobedience, Thoreau's famous essay. The Annotated Walden, edited by Philip Van Doren Stern, for the serious reader.