These volumes, edited by Thoreau’s friend and correspondent Harrison Gray Otis Blake, were organized around seasonal motifs, which served to confirm Thoreau’s early reputation as an amateur naturalist. Even Thoreau’s ethical project was often considered secondary to his investigations of nature. When the last of these volumes, Autumn, appeared in 1892, a reviewer for the Yale Literary Magazine commented that “Thoreau’s communion with nature divorced himself from the study of mankind, and therefore it is as a naturalist that he had done most for the world, and not as a propounder of ethics” (Scharnhorst, Henry David Thoreau, p. 303). A reviewer for the New York Tribune wrote, “Thoreau’s books probably have no great body of readers, but those who care for them at all care for them deeply” (Scharnhorst, p. 301). While Thoreau is regularly mentioned in anthologies and surveys around the turn of the century, and while Walden is typically singled out as his major work, there was not yet any clear consensus about Thoreau’s importance or even any significant grasp of his distinctive accomplishment.

Eventually Thoreau emerged as a major figure in the “flowering of New England” or the “American renaissance,” which in many literary histories written in the first three quarters of the twentieth century became, misleadingly enough, synonymous with American literature itself. Often aligned with Emerson and Whitman and against such “darker” figures as Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe, Thoreau was increasingly admired for the masterful artistry of Walden. Central to the classic twentieth-century interpretations of Thoreau’s work is his often intense preoccupation with language and consciousness. Both are central to Emersonian Transcendentalism, emerging out of such famous passages as Emerson’s description of the “transparent eye-ball” in the first chapter of Nature and the extended discussion of language in the “Language” chapter of the same work. Language and consciousness were beginning to emerge as central preoccupations of such major twentieth-century writers as James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, and William Faulkner. Many of the best-known nineteenth-century American writers in fact achieved their status as classic writers through interpretations advanced by twentieth-century critics and scholars who were themselves influenced by the chief writers of their own age. Indeed, D. H. Lawrence’s own Studies in Classic American Literature (1923) probably did more to cement the canon of “classic American literature” than any other single publication on the subject. F. O. Matthiessen’s highly influential study American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941)—a more scholarly volume with chapters on Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman—has many echoes of his earlier study of the modernist poet T. S. Eliot. In part because of the influence of critics like Lawrence and Matthiessen, twentieth-century readers often regarded the literature of these classic nineteenth-century American writers as distinctively and even presciently modern. Thoreau’s allusiveness, his penchant for puns—especially those playing on the etymological roots of words—and his constant attention to his own running stream of thought link him in many ways more to a figure like James Joyce than to contemporaries like Harriet Beecher Stowe or Charles Dickens, born just six and five years, respectively, before Thoreau.

It is important to recognize the shift that occurred with Thoreau’s appropriation by his later critics to the modernist canon. In effect, Thoreau’s interest in the natural world, which had been the basis for his modest reputation for some fifty or sixty years after his death, was relegated to a secondary position. For Leo Marx, writing in his influential The Machine in the Garden (1964), Thoreau’s emphasis on the natural world is actually misleading, since nature only masks the true source of meaning and value for Thoreau: “In Walden, Thoreau is clear, as Emerson seldom was, about the location of meaning and value. He is saying that it does not reside in the natural facts or in social institutions or in anything ‘out there,’ but in consciousness. It is a product of imaginative perception, of the analogy-perceiving, metaphor-making, mythopoeic power of the human mind” (p. 264).