More recently, however, literary scholars, equipped with the tools of an ecological literary criticism, have sought to understand the relationship between Thoreau’s literary and environmental projects. While there is still some disagreement about Walden’s place within Thoreau’s evolving project—some see him still struggling in Walden to free himself from classically Romantic narrative and figurative strategies—there is widespread agreement that Thoreau must be taken seriously for his study of environmental processes as well as for his concern with what are now called environmental history and ethics. Recent critics have also established Thoreau’s influence on later “literary ecologists,” including such recent environmental writers as Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, Terry Tempest Williams, and William Least Heat-Moon.

If the question of Thoreau’s environmentalism has only recently emerged in its full richness and complexity, Thoreau’s engagement with the politics of his day has always been central to readings of his work, even if critics have not always agreed how central this engagement is to his overall project. Indeed, many readers have complained that Walden’s preoccupation with language and consciousness compromises the forceful social commentary with which Thoreau opens the book. Such readers often regard Walden as the ultimate expression of New England elite culture: liberal in sentiment but hopelessly compromised by its entanglement with social institutions promoting the interests of the status quo. By contrast, Thoreau’s public lectures often address the social conflicts of the day, and they do so plainly and with straightforward moral urgency. In several of his lectures Thoreau takes on the problem of slavery and, more particularly, the North’s failure to respond to the various political maneuvers designed to protect the great compromise between North and South. Others have emphasized another shift in Thoreau’s writing after Walden, a shift in focus from the consciousness of the participant-observer to the actual social and natural world outside that consciousness. There is undoubtedly much truth to these claims, although criticisms of Walden are sometimes overstated in order to highlight shifts in Thoreau’s interests and techniques that emerged in his last decade of writing.

Walden and “Civil Disobedience” were first published together in 1948 and have since appeared together, as they do here, in at least ten different editions with countless reprintings. To some extent, this is a peculiarity of postwar book culture: Publishers sought to produce inexpensive editions of Walden, especially aimed at the high school and college markets, that included what was increasingly regarded as Thoreau’s most important work of social and political commentary, “Civil Disobedience.” Because “Civil Disobedience” is so short, the two works could and still can easily be combined in this way. Still, for all their obvious differences of design and rhetorical address, the two works form a natural pair, not least because the circumstances that led to Thoreau’s writing of “Civil Disobedience” are closely linked to his Walden experience. The story behind “Civil Disobedience” is well known, even if most of its specific details remain uncertain. Having made the mile-and-a-half walk from his cabin to the village of Concord, Thoreau was detained by the village sheriff for not having paid his poll tax. Some versions of the incident maintain that the sheriff offered to pay the tax for him, but Thoreau, acting on principle, refused. He refused to pay or to have someone else pay the tax because he would not support a government that supported slavery and that sought to extend its influence by waging war with Mexico in order to acquire its northern territories. Thoreau was arrested and jailed. He was released after just one night, his tax having been paid by someone (probably an aunt). One apparently apocryphal story that has circulated ever since has Emerson visiting Thoreau while he is still in jail. When asked by Emerson what he is doing in jail, Thoreau, assuming that principle was on his side of the jailhouse bars, is said to have responded, “What are you doing out there?”

Undoubtedly, Thoreau saw his principled stand in refusing to pay the poll tax as an enactment of the general moral and social attitudes articulated throughout Walden. It is true, however, that Walden is not shaped in response to any immediate social or political crisis, as are “Civil Disobedience,” “Slavery in Massachusetts,” “Life without Principle,” and, later, the series of talks delivered in support of the radical abolitionist John Brown, for whom Thoreau developed an intense, even worshipful admiration. New England was racked by the slavery crisis in the 1840s and ’50s, especially after the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which required that northerners return escaped slaves to their southern slave owners. Thoreau’s responses to these circumstances are sharp and impassioned. First delivered in January and February 1848, only a few months after Thoreau left his cabin at Walden Pond, “Civil Disobedience” precedes the Fugitive Slave Act and is in fact as preoccupied with the Mexican War as it is with slavery; it displays the same sense of moral outrage at his state’s and region’s complicity with slavery as with an imperial adventure that many worried would expand the reach of slavery and hence the influence of southern slave holders. The essay has proven to be enormously influential, despite being described as “crazy” by the Boston press when it first appeared under its original title, “Resistance to Civil Government.” It is remembered today less for its particular response to the crisis posed by the war than for its articulation of the more general logic of civil disobedience: staging nonviolent acts of civil disobedience to protest a government whose policies and actions are deemed by conscience both immoral and illegal. The essay’s impact on major twentieth-century advocates of nonviolent resistance, particularly Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., is no doubt in part responsible for its continuing popularity.

It is sometimes forgotten that Thoreau drew on early drafts of Walden to compose a series of lectures titled “Life in the Woods,” including one of his most popular talks, “Economy.” Thoreau probably did not draw much of a distinction between “Civil Disobedience” and talks like “Economy” or “Walking.” In any event, the same sense of moral outrage that shapes “Civil Disobedience” is evident throughout Walden. Indeed, for a work so suffused with mythopoeic ambitions, Walden is full of constant reminders of the specific social and historical challenges facing New Englanders. If Thoreau, in the few years he lived after the appearance of Walden, grew less likely to champion the virtues of social isolation, he never did imagine his isolation at Walden as anything more than an experiment; indeed, there is ample evidence, from both Walden and his journals, that he never really took seriously the idea that he could truly isolate himself from others. Rather, what Thoreau sought at Walden was a distance sufficient to allow him to take stock of his personal relations: to himself, to others, and to the world around him. Those who criticize Thoreau’s apparent embrace of redemptive isolation, or his championing of a timeless or ahistorical reality that only the isolated, unencumbered genius might acknowledge and harness, lose sight of his constant preoccupation with his social, historical, and natural environment.

If there is a side of Thoreau that is responsive to a mythopoeic reality, there is another side of him that recognizes that the impulse to discover such a reality can be cultivated only in a material and fully historical world. Although some critics still occasionally dismiss Thoreau and other Transcendentalists for their narrowness and relative isolation from the more turbulent currents of American history, such criticism rarely comes from readers steeped in their work. Thoreau is, of course, very much a creature of his time and place.