Walden and On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

Henry David Thoreau’s Walden details his experiences over the course of two years, two months, and two days in a cabin he built near Walden Pond amidst woodland owned by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, near Concord, Massachusetts. “Civil Disobedience” is a highly influential argument for disobedience to an unjust state. Both Walden and “Civil Disobedience” are timeless classics of American literature. This Warbler Classics edition includes an introduction by Charles R. Anderson and a detailed chronology of Thoreau’s life and work.

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) was an American naturalist, essayist, poet, and philosopher. He is best known for his book Walden and his essay “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” (originally published as “Resistance to Civil Government”). Thoreau was a lifelong abolitionist, delivering lectures that attacked the fugitive slave law while praising the writings of Wendell Phillips and defending the abolitionist John Brown. Thoreau’s philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced the political thoughts and actions of such notable figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. His writings on natural history and philosophy anticipated modern-day environmentalism.

Charles Robert Anderson was a professor of American literature at Johns Hopkins University, a noted literary critic, scholar, and the author of critically acclaimed works on Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, and Henry James. He was a trail-blazer in establishing American literature as an independent subject that had its own world-class writers. He died in 1999.