A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

Thoreau, Henry David

ISBN 10: 1605206520 / ISBN 13: 9781605206523

Published by Cosimo Classics 2009-07, 2009

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 6666-IUK-9781605206523

Bibliographic Details

• Title: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
• Publisher: Cosimo Classics 2009-07
• Publication Date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1605206520
• ISBN 13: 9781605206523
• Binding: PF
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Hero to environmentalists and ecologists, and a profound thinker on humanity's happiness, Henry David Thoreau was one of the strongest shapers of the American character in the 19th century. This 1849 book, written while Thoreau was living at Walden Pond, is ostensibly a travel book, written to commemorate an 1839 river journey he took with his brother, John, from Massachusetts to New Hampshire. But the trip is only the framework upon which Thoreau hangs some of his most provocative thoughts on poetry, history, religion, dreams, and the passing of a slower way of life with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the evidence of which he witnessed from the rivers. While not Thoreau's best-known work, *A Week* may be his most important, a beautifully determined attempt to understand the past and reconcile it with the future that continues to move readers today. Writer and philosopher HENRY DAVID THOREAU (1817-1862) was born in Concord, Massachusetts, and educated at Harvard University. His writings on human nature, materialism, and the natural world rank him among the most influential thinkers of American literature.

About the Author

Henry David Thoreau was an American author, poet, and philosopher, who is best known for his works Waldena treatise about living in concert with the natural worldand Civil Disobedience, in which he espoused the need to morally resist the actions of an unjust state. Thoreau s work heavily reflects the ideologies of the American transcendentalists, and he has long been considered a leading figure in the movement along with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Bronson Alcott, and, at first, Nathaniel Hawthorne (who changed his views later in life). In addition to his writing, which totaled more than twenty volumes, Thoreau was an active abolitionist, and lectured regularly against the Fugitive Slave Law. Thoreau died in 1862, and is buried along with Louisa May Alcott, Ellery Channing, and other notable Americans in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Massachusetts.