A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers/Walden; or, Life in the Woods/The Maine Woods/Cape Cod

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THE LIBRARY OF AMERICA
All of Melville, all of Hawthorne, all of James, and Emerson and Thoreau-these and the writings of other notable American novelists, historians, poets, philosophers, and essayists are, for the first time in our history, being published in a series of handsome and durable volumes. Each compact, elegant book includes several unabridged works, and some volumes run to as many as 1600 pages. Publication of the series is supported by grants from the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Thanks to their generosity, America, like other nations, can offer every reader the collected works of its major authors in authoritative editions. The commitment to publish an authoritative vefMbij of an author's work assures the reader that only after thorough riesearch and study is a text selected for this series. For each volume, a distiriguished scholar has prepared a succinct chronology of the author's life and career, an essay on the choice of... Tovább

Fülszöveg

THE LIBRARY OF AMERICA
All of Melville, all of Hawthorne, all of James, and Emerson and Thoreau-these and the writings of other notable American novelists, historians, poets, philosophers, and essayists are, for the first time in our history, being published in a series of handsome and durable volumes. Each compact, elegant book includes several unabridged works, and some volumes run to as many as 1600 pages. Publication of the series is supported by grants from the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Thanks to their generosity, America, like other nations, can offer every reader the collected works of its major authors in authoritative editions. The commitment to publish an authoritative vefMbij of an author's work assures the reader that only after thorough riesearch and study is a text selected for this series. For each volume, a distiriguished scholar has prepared a succinct chronology of the author's life and career, an essay on the choice of texts, and some necessary notes.
The collected works of America's foremost authors in uniform hardcover editions
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Collected for the first time in one volume, these are the four full-length works in which Thoreau combined his poetic sensibility, classical learning, philosophical austerity, and Yankee love of practical detail into a lifelong literary experiment in the exploration of nature.
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers is based on a boat trip Thoreau took with his brother in 1839 from Concord, Massachusetts, to Concord, New Hampshire. Ten years in the writing (it was the book he retired to Walden to work on) and incorporating essays, passages from his journal, and some of his best poems, it is a superbly crafted achievement, its texture enriched by the idealism of the Transcendentalists, the delighted word-play of an imaginative linguist, the individualism of a young American, and the earthiness of a lover of nature.
Walden is a personal declaration of independence, a social experiment, and a voyage of spiritual discovery, set within the seasonal cycle of a year's "Life in the Woods" "Simplify, simplify" is the beat of its "more distant drummer"-to abandon waste and illusion, to get to the bottom of life's essential needs, and to practice a new economy for humane living. Its witty and pointed rhetoric brings together language and nature, the human and non-human in unusual conjunctions that resonate with symbolic meanings. A manual of self-reliance as well as a masterpiece of style, it is one of the most fervently loved classics of American literature.
The Maine Woods is an account of three trips taken by boat and canoe in 1846, 1853, and 1857 through an unexplored interior bypassed by westward expansion. Vissza