Walden, a veritable treasury of American naturalism, teems with biting social observations about daily human life, not least among them: “Our life is frittered away by detail. . . . Simplify, simplify.” Henry David Thoreau built his small hut on the shore of Walden Pond in 1845. For the next two years he lived there as simply as possible, seeking “the essential facts of life” and learning to eliminate the unnecessary details—material and spiritual—that intrude upon human happiness. He described his experiences in Walden, using vivid, forceful prose that transforms his reflections on nature into richly evocative metaphors to live by. George Eliot’s review of Walden singles out qualities that have attracted readers for generations, namely “a deep poetic sensibility,” as well as Thoreau’s own “refined [and] hardy mind.” In a world obsessed with technology and luxury, Walden seems more relevant today than ever. After being imprisoned for refusing to pay Concord’s poll tax, Thoreau recounted his experience in an 1848 lecture, “The Rights and Duties of the Individual in Relation to Government.” The speech, hardly noticed in Thoreau’s lifetime, was later published as “Civil Disobedience.” Today it is widely considered the single most important essay concerning the incumbent duties of American citizens and has inspired major civil movements around the world. Introduction and Notes by Jonathan Levin “Thoreau simply refused to be complacent about his relationship to the social environment that formed and supported him. He hoped that his reflections on his Walden experience, like his account of his night in jail, would help bring a new spirit of freedom and possibility to American social and political life. In this sense, for all the apparent isolation of the hero of Walden, and for all the apparent advocacy of such radically independent experience, Thoreau’s aims in Walden are always social.” —from the Introduction by Jonathan Levin An Associate Professor of English and American Studies at Fordham University, Jonathan Levin teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature and culture. He is the author of The Poetics of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism, and American Literary Modernism (Duke University Press, 1999), as well as numerous essays and reviews. He was a fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina in 1998 and 1999, and is presently at work on a study of American literary ecology since Thoreau. Henry David Thoreau was born on July 12, 1817, in Concord, Massachusetts. While building a cabin on Walden Pond in 1845 and living there for two years, Thoreau began writing his most enduring work, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, published in 1854. 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. This experience inspired “Civil Disobedience,” unappreciated in Thoreau’s lifetime but now considered one of America’s seminal political works.