The masses of people lead lives of quiet desperation. In 1845, Henry David Thoreau left his hometown of Concord, Massachusetts, to begin a new life alone in a rough cabin he built himself one and a half miles away on the northwest shore of Walden Pond. "Walden" is Thoreau's classic autobiographical account of this experiment in solitary living, his refusal to play by the rules of hard work and the accumulation of wealth, and above all, the freedom it gave him to adapt his life to the natural world around him. This new edition of "Walden" traces the sources of Thoreau's reading and thinking and examines the author in the context of his birthplace and his understanding of history—socially, economically, and naturally. Additionally, an ecological appendix provides modern identifications of the countless plants and animals that Thoreau increasingly observed as he acclimated to his life in the woods by Walden Pond.

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