Rewind book: Ticknor and Fields, by Henry David Thoreau
Walden, one of the most famous memoirs in American literature, was written by survivalist schoolteacher Henry David Thoreau on the back of an extreme lifestyle experiment.
by Henry David Thoreau
Ticknor and Fields
In 1845, Thoreau moved into a one-room shack he built by a pond near Concord, Massachusetts. His mission: to escape urban stress and find meaning through simple living.
"I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms," he wrote in Walden (subtitled Or Life in the Woods).
At the shack, set in woodland owned by his mentor, poet-philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau lived a brutally bare-bones existence anchored in fierce self-reliance for two years. He ate woodchuck raw, cultivated a massive bean field, and gauged the depth of mythically bottomless Walden Pond, apparently capable of any task. "I have as many trades as fingers," he wrote.