Books on Henry David Thoreau

Political thought of Henry David Thoreau : privatism and the practice of philosophy (Jonathan McKenzie)

This work provides a fresh interpretation of Henry Thoreau's political theory through a comprehensive interpretation of public and private writings. While recent critics have opened new vistas in Thoreau interpretation, little attention has been paid to Thoreau's journals and correspondence.

Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Science (Robert M. Thorson)

"Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward," Thoreau invites his readers in Walden, "till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality." Walden's Shore explores Thoreau's understanding of that hard reality, not as metaphor but as physical science. Robert M. Thorson is interested in Thoreau the rock and mineral collector, interpreter of landscapes, and field scientist whose compass and measuring stick were as important to him as his plant press. At Walden's climax, Thoreau asks us to imagine a "living earth" upon which all animal and plant life is parasitic. This book examines Thoreau's understanding of the geodynamics of that living earth, and how his understanding informed the writing of Walden.

The story unfolds against the ferment of natural science in the nineteenth century, as Natural Theology gave way to modern secular science. That era saw one of the great blunders in the history of American science--the rejection of glacial theory. Thorson demonstrates just how close Thoreau came to discovering a "theory of everything" that could have explained most of the landscape he saw from the doorway of his cabin at Walden. At pivotal moments in his career, Thoreau encountered the work of the geologist Charles Lyell and that of his protégé Charles Darwin. Thorson concludes that the inevitable path of Thoreau's thought was descendental, not transcendental, as he worked his way downward through the complexity of life to its inorganic origin, the living rock.

The Routledge Guidebook to Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience. Routledge, 2015 (Bob Pepperman Taylor)

Since its publication in 1849, Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience has influenced protestors, activists and political thinkers all over the world. Including the full text of Thoreau’s essay, The Routledge Guidebook to Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience explores the context of his writing, analyses different interpretations of the text and considers how posthumous edits to Civil Disobedience have altered its intended meaning. It introduces the reader to:
• the context of Thoreau’s work and the background to his writing
• the significance of the references and allusions
• the contemporary reception of Thoreau’s essay
• the ongoing relevance of the work and a discussion of different perspectives on the work.

Providing a detailed analysis which closely examines Thoreau’s original work, this is an essential introduction for students of politics, philosophy and history, and all those seeking a full appreciation of this classic work.

The Language of the Senses: Sensory Perceptual Dynamics in Wordsworth, Coleridge, Thoreau, Whitman and Dickinson. Liverpool University Press, 1998 (Kerry McSweeney)

McSweeney discusses the sensory acuity that informs the finest achievements of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Thoreau, Whitman and Dickinson and which, when blunted by illness or age, contributes to an attenuation of their creative power. He supplies a ‘sensory profile’ or sensory history for each author and through close readings shows how this profile affected their relationship to the external world and their powers of symbolic perception.

Henry David Thoreau: A Life (Laura Dassow Walls)

Walls traces the full arc of Thoreau’s life, from his early days in the intellectual hothouse of Concord, when the American experiment still felt fresh and precarious, and “America was a family affair, earned by one generation and about to pass to the next.” By the time he died in 1862, at only forty-four years of age, Thoreau had witnessed the transformation of his world from a community of farmers and artisans into a bustling, interconnected commercial nation.

Nineteenth-Century Individualism and the Market Economy: Individualist Themes in Emerson, Thoreau, and Sumner. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018 (Luke Philip Plotica)

This book studies nineteenth-century American individualism and its relationship to the simultaneous rise of the market economy as articulated in the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and William Graham Sumner. The argument of the book is that these thinkers offer distinct visions of individualism that reflect their respective understandings of the market, and provide thoughtful and insightful perspectives upon the promise and peril of this economic and social order. Looking back to Emerson, Thoreau, and Sumner furnishes valuable insights about the history of American political and social thought, as well as about the complexity of one of the most basic and prevalent relationships of modern life: that between the individual and the institutional complex of the market.

Image: Roderick Maclver