Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau (Illustrated)

by Henry David Thoreau

Overview

For over a hundred and fifty years, the essays, poetry and journals of the leading transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau have won the admiration of readers, due to the author’s natural observation, symbolic meanings, poetic sensibility, philosophical austerity and practical detail. This comprehensive eBook presents the complete published works of Henry David Thoreau, with numerous illustrations, informative introductions and the largest collection of journals available to eReaders. (Version 1)

* Beautifully illustrated with images relating to Thoreau’s life and works
* Concise introductions to the books and other texts
* All 5 books, with individual contents tables
* Images of how the books were first printed, giving your eReader a taste of the original texts
* Excellent formatting of the texts
* The complete essays – with rare works often missed out of collections
* The complete poetry, with special chronological and alphabetical contents tables
* Easily locate the poems or short stories you want to read
* Includes Thoreau’s letters – spend hours exploring the author’s personal correspondence
* Features over 2,000 pages of Thoreau’s journals
* Special criticism section, with essays evaluating Thoreau’s personality and contribution to literature
* Features a bonus biography by the author’s close friend Ralph Waldo Emerson – discover Thoreau’s literary life
* Scholarly ordering of texts into chronological order and literary genres

Please note: due to copyright restrictions we are unable to offer the complete journals. However, the collection provides a generous sample of Thoreau’s journals, offering the complete journals for 1837-1847, a detailed example of the ‘middle’ journals for 1855-1856 and the complete last year of Thoreau’s life, as well as a generous selection from all of the other journals.

CONTENTS:

The Books
A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS
WALDEN, OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS
THE MAINE WOODS
CAPE COD
A YANKEE IN CANADA

The Essays
AULUS PERSIUS FLACCUS
THE SERVICE
NATURAL HISTORY OF MASSACHUSETTS
A WALK TO WACHUSETT
SIR WALTER RALEIGH
DARK AGES
A WINTER WALK
THE LANDLORD
PARADISE (TO BE) REGAINED
HOMER. OSSIAN. CHAUCER.
HERALD OF FREEDOM
WENDELL PHILLIPS BEFORE THE CONCORD LYCEUM
THOMAS CARLYLE AND HIS WORKS
ON THE DUTY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
WALKING
LOVE
CHASTITY AND SENSUALITY
SLAVERY IN MASSACHUSETTS
LIFE WITHOUT PRINCIPLE
AUTUMNAL TINTS
A PLEA FOR CAPTAIN JOHN BROWN
MARTYRDOM OF JOHN BROWN
THE LAST DAYS OF JOHN BROWN
THE SUCCESSION OF FOREST TREES
WILD APPLES
NIGHT AND MOONLIGHT
HUCKLEBERRIES

The Poems
LIST OF POEMS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER
LIST OF POEMS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER

The Translations
PROMETHEUS BOUND OF ÆSCHYLUS
TRANSLATIONS FROM PINDAR

The Letters
FAMILIAR LETTERS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU

The Journals
THOREAU’S JOURNALS

The Criticism
HENRY DAVID THOREAU: HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS by Robert Louis Stevenson
BROOK FARM AND CONCORD by Henry James
Extracts from AMERICAN NOTEBOOKS by Nathaniel Hawthorne
THE FORESTER by Amos Bronson Alcott
A FABLE FOR CRITICS by James Russell Lowell
HENRY D. THOREAU by Elbert Hubbard
THOREAU by Virginia Woolf
ANOTHER WORD ON THOREAU by John Burroughs

The Biography
THOREAU: BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Customer Reviews

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781909496736
Publisher:	Delphi Classics
Publication date:	08/11/2015
Series:	Series Three
Sold by:	PUBLISHDRIVE KFT
Format:	eBook
File size:	15 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Henry David Thoreau was born on July 12, 1817, in Concord, Massachusetts, the third of four children. His family lived on a modest, sometimes meager, income; his father, John, worked by turns as a farmer, schoolteacher, grocer, and pencil-maker; his mother, Cynthia, was a teacher and would take in boarders when money was scarce. Young Henry's gifts manifested themselves early. He wrote his first piece, "The Seasons," at age ten, and memorized portions of Shakespeare, the Bible, and Samuel Johnson while studying at the Center School and Concord Academy. In addition to his academic pursuits, Henry rambled through the countryside on exploratory walks and attended lectures at the Concord Lyceum, where as an adult he would fascinate audiences with his discourses on life on Walden Pond.

Thoreau began his studies at Harvard College in 1833. His years at Harvard were stimulating, if solitary; he immersed himself in a traditional humanities curriculum of multiple languages, anatomy, history, and geography. Upon graduation in 1837, he began teaching in Concord at the Center School, the public school he'd attended as a boy, but left his post after being told to administer corporal punishment to a student. During these years following college Thoreau published his first essay and poem, began lecturing at the Concord Lyceum, and attended Transcendentalist discussions at the home of his mentor, the renowned essayist and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. At Emerson's urging, Thoreau started a journal -- a project that would become his lifelong passion and culminate in more than two million words.

A boat trip with his brother, John, in 1839 set the foundation for his well known work A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Sadly, unforeseen tragedy separated the tightly knit brothers in 1842, when John died of lockjaw caused by a razor cut. The following year, Thoreau joined Emerson in editing the Transcendental periodical The Dial, a publication to which Thoreau would become a prolific contributor. He also pulled up stakes for a time, accepting a position to tutor Emerson's children in Staten Island, New York. Half a year later, Thoreau returned to his family's house in Concord, deeply affected by the abolitionists he had met in Manhattan. He dedicated much of his time to lectures and essays advocating abolition and became involved in sheltering runaway slaves on their journey north.

In 1846 Thoreau was briefly imprisoned for refusing to pay a poll tax to the village of Concord, in protest against the government's support of slavery, as well as its war of expansion with Mexico. His experience in the Concord jail led to the writing of what would later be titled "Civil Disobedience." Unappreciated in Thoreau's lifetime, "Civil Disobedience" is now considered one of the country's seminal political works.

During this period, Thoreau built his cabin on Walden Pond and lived there for a little more than two years. In this small home on Emerson's property, he began writing his most enduring work, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, and finished the manuscript for A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Sales were exceedingly poor, with Thoreau eventually acquiring 706 unsold copies of the original 1000 copy print run. Thoreau quipped, "I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself." When Walden was published in 1854, sales were brisk and its reception favorable, although Thoreau's work as a whole remained somewhat obscure during his lifetime.

By the time Walden was published, Thoreau had turned from the largely symbolic approach to nature that he had learned from Emerson and other Romantic writers to a much more empirical approach, more in keeping with new scientific methods. His observations of nature throughout the 1850s, largely recorded in his journals, have come to be regarded as a model of ecological attentiveness, even though the term "ecology" was not coined until 1866. He developed several talks on the natural history of the Concord region, and even set to work on a series of longer, book-length manuscripts. Two of these, one on the dispersal of tree seeds and the other on the region's many wild fruits, were not published until 1993 and 2000 respectively. Today, Thoreau's writing is valued for both the poetic imagination and the scientific methodology it displays.

As the years passed, Thoreau's commitment to the antislavery movement strengthened, as did his popularity as a lecturer and essayist. Even in the declining health of his later years, he remained a man of conviction and action, writing on many subjects and participating in various political causes until shortly before his death from tuberculosis. George Eliot's review of Walden singles out qualities that attract readers to this day: "a deep poetic sensibility" and "a refined as well as a hardy mind." Henry David Thoreau died on May 6, 1862, in Concord.

Author biography from the Barnes & Noble Classics edition of Walden.

Date of Birth:

July 12, 1817

Date of Death:

May 6, 1862

Place of Birth:

Concord, Massachusetts

Place of Death:

Concord, Massachusetts

Education:

Concord Academy, 1828-33); Harvard University, 1837