The Portable Thoreau (Portable Library)
Henry David Thoreauwas born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1817. He graduated from Harvard in 1837, the same year he began his lifelong Journal. Inspired by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau became a key member of the Transcendentalist movement that included Margaret Fuller and Bronson Alcott. The Transcendentalists' faith in nature was tested by Thoreau between 1845 and 1847 when he lived for twenty-six months in a homemade hut at Walden Pond. While living at Walden, Thoreau worked on the two books published during his lifetime:Walden(1854) andA Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers(1849). Several of his other works, includingThe Maine Woods, Cape Cod, andExcursions, were published posthumously. Thoreau died in Concord, at the age of forty-four, in 1862.Carl Bode, professor emeritus of English/American Studies at the University of Maryland, is a freelance writer.  Founder and first president of the American Studies Assocation, he is also past president of he Popular Culture Association and the Mencken Society.  His books includeThe American Lyceum,Antebellum Culture, andMencken.  He has editedCollected Poems of Henry ThoreauandThe Best of Thoreau's Journals; and has co-editedThe Correspondence of Henry David Thoreauand, in collaboration with Malcolm Cowley,The Portable Emerson.