Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau's Walden; or, Life in the Woods is the ur-text--the foundational document--of American nature writing. Many earlier American explorers, naturalists, and authors had described the natural wonders of the new continent but, until Thoreau, no author had located "nature" at the center of one vision of the American psyche. Like Wordsworth, however, Thoreau's nature writing is as much about its author, his learning and his reading, as it is about any objective vision of the natural world. Within the first chapter of Walden, appropriately called "Economy," Thoreau refers to the Sandwich Islanders, Deucalion and Pyrrha, Raleigh, Evelyn, Hippocrates, Confucius, Darwin on Tierra del Fuego, Salem Harbor, Hanno and the Phoenicians, and St. Petersburg, Russia. So this is a book about other books, about history, biography, philosophy, farming, and comparative religion as much as it is a book about "nature."
Thoreau was also allying himself with another tradition of natural history writing, one that goes back at least to Gilbert White in England; that is, the idea that the natural historian remains near one precise geographic location—the village of Selborne in White's case (1789), Walden Pond in Thoreau's (1854)—and then describes the flora and fauna of the circumscribed region, as well as the seasonal changes that occur there, with an almost obsessive dedication to careful observation and detailed description. This powerful tradition continues in America through writers such as John Muir (the redwoods of California , 1894) and Aldo Leopold (Sand County, Wisconsin, 1949), down to Edward Abbey (the desert Southwest, 1949) and Annie Dillard (Tinker Creek, Virginia, 1974), and Bill McKibben (The End of Nature,1989, and Hope, Human and Wild, 1995) in more recent times.
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Useful E-Texts and Hypertexts for the study of Thoreau:
Link to Thoreau Institute e-texts at the Walden Woods Project (the most complete hypertext archive of Thoreau texts and image, indispensible for scholars and students):
http://www.walden.org/Institute/E-texts.htm
Link to Walden Woods Project (the complete web archive):
Watch a YouTube video of Thoreau's words over images of Walden Pond:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0Quw_RPB0U
Actor Mark Ruffalo reads selections from "Civil Disobedience" (originally called