Hawthorne commented in his notebooks as early as 1842 that Thoreau “has repudiated all regular modes of getting a living, and seems inclined to lead a sort of Indian life among civilized men—an Indian life, I mean, as respects the absence of any systematic effort for a livelihood” (Hawthorne, p. 106). Apart from the blatant racism of the comment—the all-too-pat opposition between civilization and savagery characteristic of the age—Hawthorne captured what many felt about Thoreau: His singular eccentricities and his almost religious dedication to his afternoon walks in the woods might ultimately get in the way of his making any lasting contribution to the great social and literary movement of the age. A few years later Hawthorne would write, “There is one chance in a thousand that he might write a most excellent and readable book,” though he did allow that such a book, if written, would be “a book of simple observation of nature, somewhat in the vein of White’s History of Selborne” (Borst, p. 42). Nobody seems to have had great faith in Thoreau’s potential. Emerson would write in his journal in 1851, even as Thoreau was writing and rewriting Walden, “Thoreau wants a little ambition in his mixture. Fault of this, instead of being the head of American engineers, he is captain of a huckleberry party” (Porte, Emerson in His Journals, p. 426). Emerson maintained this objection to the end, incorporating it almost verbatim into his eulogy for Thoreau, along with the observation that “pounding beans is good to the end of pounding empires one of these days; but if, at the end of years, it is still only beans!” (Poirier, Ralph Waldo Emerson, p. 488).

Still, for all his own and others’ doubts, Thoreau was, in fact, busy all along pounding out words. In addition to A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and, eventually, Walden, he published a good many essays in the years before Walden appeared, in both popular magazines and more specialized literary journals. Many of these essays formed the basis of no fewer than five volumes of previously uncollected and unpublished material that appeared within four years of Thoreau’s untimely death in 1862: Excursions (1863), The Maine Woods (1864), Cape Cod (1865), Letters to Various Persons (1865), and A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers (1866). He had, as well, composed a journal, which ran more than two million words and fourteen volumes in the last published edition. He compiled some 3,000 manuscript pages in eleven volumes of what he called his “Indian books,” a record of his wide-ranging reading on the early history of Native Americans in North America. Nobody is quite sure what he meant to do with this material, but the notebooks constitute a treasure trove of information for anyone seeking to understand Thoreau’s imaginative response to Native Americans. In addition, Thoreau completed draft manuscripts of two major contributions to the emerging understanding of New England’s natural history, works that have been published only recently as Faith in a Seed (1993) and Wild Fruits (2000). Today, with almost all of this material readily available (including published excerpts from the “Indian books”), there is little reason to question Thoreau’s impressive productivity. But these questions haunted Thoreau and his friends during his lifetime, when so little of this literary and intellectual achievement was available.

Perhaps Emerson’s anxieties about Thoreau’s productivity have some ulterior explanation, one having less to do with Thoreau’s actual accomplishments than with Emerson’s sense of how little apparent effect his literary and spiritual revolution was having on the overwhelming dominance of purely material progress in the United States. The engineers were indeed winning the day, and Emerson had, after all, hoped that the American scholar would contribute to that world’s moral and spiritual regeneration. Emerson apparently did not fully understand the relationship between Thoreau’s daily excursions into the countryside and his lifework. Nor did he grasp the depth of Thoreau’s feeling about nature. Emerson had also been interested in natural history, but he never acquired the firsthand knowledge Thoreau acquired in his ramblings around Concord, throughout New England, and on trips as far afield as Canada and, near the end of his life, Minnesota. Though he began as something of an amateur, Thoreau trained himself to be an accomplished, even a semiprofessional naturalist, fully conversant with the most advanced literature of botanists and natural historians—including the emerging theory of evolution—and highly skilled at making, recording, and interpreting field observations. Thoreau may have looked to some like a wide-eyed enthusiast of the woods, but he was in fact something of an early field ecologist, exploring the natural environment with a distinctive combination of scientific inquiry and poetic reflection.

Given the ambivalence of even his closest contemporary friends and supporters, it is not surprising that Thoreau’s reputation has had its ups and downs over the years. At first, it was mainly as a nature enthusiast that he was admired. Despite the commercial failure of A Week, Walden was a moderate success when it was first published in 1854, receiving good reviews and selling well if not spectacularly well. Walden did not, however, immediately establish Thoreau’s place among major American writers. Though much of Thoreau’s work made its way into print soon after his death, none of it sold especially well. Excerpts from the journals first appeared in four volumes published in the 1880s and 1890s.