Walden

89 Pages 22325 Words

uly 4, 1845, his cabin complete, Thoreau moved to the woods by Walden Pond. He spent the next two years there composing the initial drafts to the two works on which his later reputation would largely rest: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, first published in 1849, and Walden; or, Life in the Woods, first published in 1854. Thoreau’s isolation during this period is sometimes exaggerated. He lived within easy walking distance of Concord, and received frequent visitors in his shack, most often his close friend and traveling companion William Ellery Channing.

During a journey Thoreau made to Concord in July of 1846, the constable apprehended and imprisoned him for nonpayment of a poll tax that he refused to pay because it supported a nation endorsing slavery. In the mild scandal aroused by this gesture against authority, Thoreau defended his actions in a lecture to the Concord Lyceum, in which he publicly expounded his reasons for resisting state authority. Later he revised and published this lecture under the title “Civil Disobed...