Walden, or Life in the Woods, also known as Walden or Life in a Cabin in the Woods, is a book by American writer Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) published in 1854, which has become a "classic of all alternatives." In Walden, Thoreau describes his life in a cabin that he built in 1845 in the woods of Concord, Massachusetts, on land owned by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, where he sought to retreat from the industrialized mass society of young America for more than two years. According to his own account, however, it was not about a naive escape from the world, but rather an attempt to realize an alternative and balanced lifestyle. "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach.".