The Portable Thoreau

Carl Bode brings together the best of Thoreau' s works in The Portable Thoreau, a comprehensive collection of the writings of a unique and profoundly influential American thinker.The complete texts of Thoreau's classic works Walden and Civil Disobedience, as well as selections from The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, the Journal, and eighteen poems are included. Bode's introduction rounds out this compact volume, offering a thorough and informative analysis of Thoreau and the forces that shaped his life and writing.

"How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live," Henry David Thoreau once observed. The American poet, essayist and philosopher certainly held himself to that standard -- living out the tenets of Transcendentalism, recounting the experience in his masterpiece, Walden (1854), and passionately advocating human rights and civil liberties in the famous essay, Civil Disobedience (1849).