Walden

In 1845 Henry David Thoreau borrowed an axe, built a small cabin on the shore of Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts, and lived there for two years, two months and two days. Walden (1854) is his account of that experiment: part practical handbook on building, farming and spending, part nature journal that follows the seasons around the pond, and part sharp, funny argument about how much of our lives we trade away for things we don't need.

Bound here with it is "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience" (1849), Thoreau's essay on conscience and government, written after a night in jail for refusing to pay a poll tax. It went on to influence generations of reformers. Both works reward slow reading, and this volume offers them in the original text alongside a modern-English edition.