Henry David Thoreau

"Walden ou la vie dans les bois" de Henry David Thoreau. Essayiste, enseignant, philosophe, naturaliste amateur et po te am ricain (1817-1862).

This illustrated edition of Walden features 66 photographs by Herbert W. Gleason, one of the great American landscape photographers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Gleason, who had a special love for what he called "the simple beauty of New England," became interested in Thoreau's work when commissioned in 1906 by the Houghton Mifflin Company to illustrate their edition of The Writings of Henry David Thoreau. With the help of the few surviving people who had known Thoreau, Gleason searched out the exact places Thoreau had described--all of them still looking much as they had when Thoreau knew them--and photographed them. Gleason became so interested in the project that he continued to photograph Thoreau country for more than forty years. Most of the photographs reproduced here were chosen by Gleason himself for an edition of Walden he planned but never published. Originally published in 1973. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This set of timeless essays from the quintessential American shares his valuable philosophies on nature, solitude, slavery, religion, politics, fulfilling work, civil responsibilities, and more. WALDEN, Thoreau’s beloved and well-known reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, looks at how the outside world can benefit from renouncing a materialistic way of life. “If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.” —Thoreau “If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.” —Thoreau His other essays deal with the social problems of his time: CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE applies principles of individualism to civil life, culminating in a call for a life that answers to a power outside of and unaffected by the state. LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE offers his program for a righteous livelihood through ten “commandments.” SLAVERY IN MASSACHUSETTS is based on a speech he gave at an antislavery rally after the re-enslavement of fugitive slave Anthony Burns and relates that freedom could not exist while slavery remained. PLEA FOR CAPTAIN JAMES BROWN portrays his kinship to Brown’s abolitionist efforts and anger toward the injustice Brown received. “Thoreau was a great writer, philosopher, poet, and withal a most practical man, that is, he taught nothing he was not prepared to practise in himself. . . . He went to gaol for the sake of his principles and suffering humanity. His essay has, therefore, been sanctified by suffering. Moreover, it is written for all time. Its incisive logic is unanswerable.” —Mohandas Gandhi “. . . when, in the mid-1950s, the United States Information Service included as a standard book in all their libraries around the world a textbook . . . which reprinted Thoreau’s ‘Civil Disobedience,’ the late Senator Joseph McCarthy succeeded in having that book removed from the shelves—specifically because of the Thoreau essay.” —Walter Harding, in The Variorum Civil Disobedience "I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. No other person has been more eloquent and passionate in getting this idea across than Henry David Thoreau. As a result of his writings and personal witness, we are the heirs of a legacy of creative protest." —Martin Luther King, Jr., Autobiography

This set of timeless essays from the quintessential American shares his valuable philosophies on nature, solitude, slavery, religion, politics, fulfilling work, civil responsibilities, and more. WALDEN, Thoreau’s beloved and well-known reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, looks at how the outside world can benefit from renouncing a materialistic way of life. “If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.” —Thoreau “If a plant cannot live according to its nature, it dies; and so a man.” —Thoreau His other essays deal with the social problems of his time: CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE applies principles of individualism to civil life, culminating in a call for a life that answers to a power outside of and unaffected by the state. LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE offers his program for a righteous livelihood through ten “commandments.” SLAVERY IN MASSACHUSETTS is based on a speech he gave at an antislavery rally after the re-enslavement of fugitive slave Anthony Burns and relates that freedom could not exist while slavery remained. PLEA FOR CAPTAIN JAMES BROWN portrays his kinship to Brown’s abolitionist efforts and anger toward the injustice Brown received. “Thoreau was a great writer, philosopher, poet, and withal a most practical man, that is, he taught nothing he was not prepared to practise in himself. . . . He went to gaol for the sake of his principles and suffering humanity. His essay has, therefore, been sanctified by suffering. Moreover, it is written for all time. Its incisive logic is unanswerable.” —Mohandas Gandhi “. . . when, in the mid-1950s, the United States Information Service included as a standard book in all their libraries around the world a textbook . . . which reprinted Thoreau’s ‘Civil Disobedience,’ the late Senator Joseph McCarthy succeeded in having that book removed from the shelves—specifically because of the Thoreau essay.” —Walter Harding, in The Variorum Civil Disobedience "I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. No other person has been more eloquent and passionate in getting this idea across than Henry David Thoreau. As a result of his writings and personal witness, we are the heirs of a legacy of creative protest." —Martin Luther King, Jr., Autobiography

On the Duty of Civil Disobedience/A Plea for Captain John Brown is a collection of two Henry David Thoreau classic works. On the Duty of Civil Disobedience is a classic political science essay by Henry David Thoreau provides the argument that people should not permit governments to overrule their consciences, and that people have a duty to avoid allowing such acquiescence to enable the government to make them the agents of injustice. In 1848, Thoreau gave lectures at the Concord Lyceum entitled "The Rights and Duties of the Individual in relation to Government". 1] This formed the basis for his essay, which was first published under the title Resistance to Civil Government in a 1849 anthology by Elizabeth Peabody calledAesthetic Papers. 2] The latter title distinguished Thoreau's program from that of the "non-resistants" (anarcho-pacifists) who were expressing similar views. Resistance also served as part of Thoreau's metaphor comparing the government to a machine: when the machine was producing injustice, it was the duty of conscientious citizens to be "a counter friction" (i.e., a resistance) "to stop the machine". 3] In 1866, four years after Thoreau's death, the essay was reprinted in a collection of Thoreau's work (A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers) under the title Civil Disobedience. Today, the essay also appears under the title On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, perhaps to contrast it with William Paley's Of the Duty of Civil Obedience to which Thoreau was in part responding. For instance, the 1960 New American Library Signet Classics edition of Walden included a version with this title. On Civil Disobedience is another common title. The word civil has several definitions. The one that is intended in this case is "relating to citizens and their interrelations with one another or with the state", and so civil disobedience means "disobedience to the state". Sometimes people assume that civil in this case means "observing accepted social forms; polite" which would make civil disobedience something like polite, orderly disobedience. Although this is an acceptable dictionary definition of the word civil, it is not what is intended here. This misinterpretation is one reason the essay is sometimes considered to be an argument for pacifism or for exclusively nonviolent resistance. For instance, Mahatma Gandhi used this interpretation to suggest an equivalence between Thoreau's civil disobedience and his own satyagraha.