A Year in Thoreau's Journal: 1851

"Is not the poet bound to write his own biography?  Is there any other work for his but a good journal?  We do not wish to know how his imaginary hero, but how he, the actual hero, lived from day to day." --Henry David Thoreau

Both a record of Thoreau's intellectual development and a magnificent example of his writings about the natural history of his native Concord, Thoreau's Journal is one of his greatest achievements. By presenting one full year of the Journal rater than brief excerpts, this volume offers readers a view of the actual process of Thoreau's journal keeping.  It reveals the emergence of some of his most profound ideas and conveys the significane of his Journal as a means of self-discovery. 

As H. Daniel Peck points out in his introduction, the early 1850s were particularly important to Thoreau: his first book, A Week on the concord and Merrimack Rivers, was published in 1849, Walden in 1854.  In this same period, Thoreau recognized that his Journal was a work of art in its own right, and it became his central literary concern for the rest of his life.

Introduction by H. Daniel Peck

About the Author

Henry David Thoreau was 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) and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). Several of his other works, including The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, and Excursions, were published posthumously. Thoreau died in Concord, at the age of forty-four, in 1862.