WHERE I LIVED AND WHAT I LIVED FOR (PENGUIN GREAT IDEAS)

Henry David Thoreau (1817-62) was born in Concord, Massachusetts and educated at Harvard. He became a follower and a friend of Emerson, and described himself as a mystic and a transcendentalist. Although he published only two books in his lifetime, Walden (from which this book is taken) is regarded as a literary masterpeice and one of the most significant books of the 19th century. Thoreau's account of his solitary and self-sufficient home in the New England woods remains an inspiration to the environmental movement - a call to his fellow men to abandon their striving, materialistic existences of 'quiet desperation' for a simple life within their means, finding spiritual truth through awareness of the sheer beauty of their surroundings.