A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers Read Online

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

Concord River

Saturday

Sunday

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

NOTES

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A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS

Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1817. He graduated from Harvard in 1837, the same year he began his lifelong journal. Inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau became a key member of the Transcendentalist movement that included Margaret Fuller and Bronson Alcott. The Transcendentalists’ faith in nature was tested by Thoreau between 1845 and 1847, when he lived for twenty-six months in a homemade hut at Walden Pond. While living at Walden, Thoreau worked on the two books published during his lifetime: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and Walden (1854). Several of his other works, including The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, and Excursions, were published posthumously. Thoreau died in Concord, at the age of forty-four, in 1862.

H. Daniel Peck, professor of English at Vassar College, is the author of Thoreau’s Morning Work (1990) and A World by Itself: The Pastoral Moment in Cooper’s Fiction (1977). He is the editor of The Green American Tradition (1989) and New Essays on The Last of the Mohicans (1992).

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First published in the United States of America 1849
This edition with an introduction and notes by H. Daniel Peck
published in Penguin Books 1998

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Thoreau, Henry David, 1817-1862.
A week on the Concord and Merrimack rivers / Henry David Thoreau;
with an introduction and notes by H. Daniel Peck.
p. cm.—(Penguin classics)
Includes bibliographical references.

eISBN : 978-1-440-67271-2

1. Concord River (Mass.)—Description and travel. 2. Merrimack
River (N.H. and Mass.)—Description and travel. 3. Thoreau, Henry
David, 1817-1862—Journeys—Massachusetts—Concord River.
4. Thoreau, Henry David, 1817-1862—Journeys—Merrimack River
(N.H. and Mass.) I. Peck, H. Daniel. II. Title. III.