Introduction

'I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.' Walden records Thoreau's two years and more in his cabin by the pond. He built the house, grew beans and baked bread with his own hands, set down every item of expense, and showed that a man need work only six weeks a year to support himself, leaving the rest of his time for reading, walking and thought. 'The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.' He describes the pond through the seasons, the ice and snow, the squirrels and the loon, in prose as clear as the water itself. Civil Disobedience, written after his night in jail for refusing to pay a tax, argues that when a government acts unjustly the individual has the right to refuse peacefully to obey. The essay profoundly influenced Tolstoy, Gandhi and Martin Luther King.