Walden

In July 1845 Henry David Thoreau moved into a small cabin he had built himself beside Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts, and lived there for two years and two months. Walden tells what he learned, from the exact cost of his boards and nails to the changes of the seasons, the habits of animals and the sounds of the railway across the pond.

'I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,' he writes, and the book is an argument for a simpler life with fewer possessions and more attention. Published in 1854, it has inspired environmentalists, minimalists and anyone tired of hurry. Thoreau was a friend of Emerson, who owned the land.

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was born in Concord, Massachusetts, studied at Harvard and worked in his family's pencil business, as a surveyor and as a handyman in Emerson's house. From 1845 to 1847 he lived alone in a cabin by Walden Pond, the experience behind Walden.

In 1846 he spent a night in jail for refusing to pay a tax that supported slavery and the war with Mexico, and his essay Civil Disobedience, born from that night, inspired Gandhi and Martin Luther King. He died of tuberculosis at forty-four, leaving journals that fill thousands of pages of observations of nature.