An open library of thought
Live deliberately; refuse what conscience condemns.
Works, testimonies and further readings are distinguished. Dates refer to composition or first publication, as specified in each entry.
These records present three works: Walden, the 1849 essay on resistance to civil government and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. The journal, the lectures, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, the essays on walking and wild fruits, the late natural-history manuscripts and the correspondence are not indexed here; this is a selection, not a complete bibliography.
011854
Published in 1854 after several rounds of revision, the book compresses a stay from 1845 to 1847 into the cycle of a single year. The cabin was within an easy walk of the village and Thoreau kept seeing family and friends: Walden is a deliberate literary composition, not a diary of isolation.
021849
First delivered as a lecture at the Concord Lyceum in 1848 and printed in 1849 as Resistance to Civil Government, the essay received the title Civil Disobedience in a posthumous collection of 1866. It grew out of his night in jail in July 1846, during the war against Mexico.
031849
Written largely at Walden and published at the author’s expense in 1849, the book is also an elegy for John, who died in 1842. It sold poorly: in 1853 the publisher returned more than seven hundred unsold copies, and Thoreau joked about owning a library mostly written by himself.