On August 9, 1854, Henry David Thoreau published Walden; or, Life in the Woods.
His friend Ralph Waldo Emerson said he saw a “tremble of great expectation” in Thoreau just before publication day.
Though the book is a classic now and Thoreau is established in American literature, things weren't so auspicious then. Thoreau’s previous book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), a travelogue that he wrote with his brother, John Thoreau, sold fewer than 300 copies. On the day he got his 706 unsold copies back from the publisher, he wrote in his diary: “I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself ...”
Walden didn’t do much better. It took five years to sell off the first edition of 2,000 copies, and Thoreau did not live to see a second edition. He managed to arrange a nationwide lecture tour, but only one city made an offer, and so Thoreau kept his lectures to the Concord area.
Since then, millions of copies of Walden in many editions have been sold.
Thoreau was deeply influenced by the transcendentalist movement, which emphasized individualism, self-reliance, and a close relationship with nature. He also became involved in the abolitionist movement and was a strong advocate for civil disobedience as a means of protesting unjust laws.
Thoreau’s health began to decline in the 1850s, and he died on May 6, 1862, at the age of 44, of tuberculosis. Despite his relatively short life, Thoreau’s influence has been enormous, and he is considered one of the most important figures in American literature and philosophy.
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