Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Poems is published. Thoreau accidentally sets fire to the Concord Woods.

1845In a small space on Emerson’s property, Thoreau builds his Walden Pond cabin, where he will live for the next two years. At Walden Pond, he writes A Week on the Merrimack and Concord Rivers and his first version of Walden. Poe’s The Raven and Other Poems is published.
1846Thoreau makes another trip to Maine, where he climbs Mount Katahdin. In July he is jailed for refusing to pay a poll tax, in protest against the government’s support of slavery and the Mexican War. After a night in jail, he is released when someone (presumably a family member) pays the tax. The experience inspires the work that later will be titled “Civil Disobedience.”
1847Thoreau moves out of the Walden cabin and into Emerson’s home. He gives a speech at the Concord Lyceum titled “A History of Myself.”
1848He moves back into his family home. He delivers “The Rights and Duties of the Individual in Relation to Government” at the Concord Lyceum; the speech, hardly noticed in Thoreau’s lifetime, later will be published as the highly influential “Civil Disobedience.”
1849A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers is published to lackluster reviews.“ Resistance to Civil Government,” the original published title of ”Civil Disobedience,“ appears. Thoreau visits Cape Cod for the first time.
1850Thoreau travels to Cape Cod and Canada. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is published. The Fugitive Slave Act (part of the Compromise of 1850) is passed, stating that north- erners must return escaped slaves to their owners.
1851Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is published.
1854After five years of trying, Thoreau finds a publisher for Walden; or, Life in the Woods. The book is warmly received by critics, including George Eliot, who praises it in Westminster Review (January 1856).
1855Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is published. Thoreau makes another trip to Cape Cod.
1856Thoreau meets Whitman.
1857Thoreau meets the activist and abolitionist John Brown. He travels to Maine and Cape Cod.
1859Thoreau’s father dies. On October 16 John Brown makes his doomed raid to liberate slaves at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia); he is caught, tried, and hanged for treason. Thoreau speaks on behalf of Brown before, during, and after his execution. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection is published.
1860In December Thoreau contracts bronchitis that, compounded by tuberculosis, leaves him seriously ill. Abraham Lincoln is elected president.
1861In hopes of improving his health, Thoreau travels to Minnesota, where he meets Native Americans and collects various specimens of plants. He returns home and makes preparations for his death, including the establishment of an estate for his mother and sister. The American Civil War begins.
1862Thoreau continues to write and visit with friends despite his severe illness. He dies in Concord on May 6, and is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.
1863Excursions is published.
1864The Maine Woods is published.
1865Thoreau’s letters are published in Letters to various Persons, edited by Emerson. Cape Cod is published.
1866A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers is published.
1906His journals are published in a 14-volume edition entitled The Writings of Henry David Thoreau.
1993Faith in a Seed, a collection of Thoreau’s writings on natural history, is published.
2000His last discovered manuscript, Wild Fruits, also on natural history, is published.

Introduction

In the summer of 1845, Henry David Thoreau moved into a small cabin he’d built near the shore of Walden Pond, about a mile and a half south of his native village of Concord, Massachusetts. Although Thoreau’s experience over the next two years, two months, and two days could hardly be considered a wilderness adventure, it did nevertheless constitute a significant departure from the norm. Most of his neighbors, at least, thought he was a little bit crazy. As Thoreau suggests in the early chapters of Walden, he set out to conduct an experiment: Could he survive, possibly even thrive, by stripping away all superfluous luxuries, living a plain, simple life in radically reduced conditions? Besides building his own shelter and providing the fuel to heat it (that is, chopping his own firewood), he would grow and catch his own food, even provide his own entertainment. It was, as he delighted to point out, an experiment in basic home economics; but in truth, his aim was to investigate the larger moral and spiritual economy of such a life. If, as he notes in the book’s first chapter, the “mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” perhaps by leaving it all behind and starting over on the relatively isolated shores of Walden Pond he could restore some of life’s seemingly diminished vigor.

Indeed, there is plenty of undiminished vigor on display in these pages. Nathaniel Hawthorne in his journal described Henry as “a young man with much of wild original nature still remaining in him” (Hawthorne, The Heart of Hawthorne’s Journals, p. 105; see “For Further Reading”), and readers have often since regarded him—along with Walt Whitman—as something like the wild man of nineteenth-century American literature. Few readers ever forget the start of Walden’s “Higher Laws” chapter: “As I came home through the woods with my string of fish, trailing my pole, it being now quite dark, I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw; not that I was hungry then, except for that wildness which he represented” (p. 166).