In 1845 Henry David Thoreau, disdainful of America's growing commercialism and industrialism, left his home town of Concord, Massachusetts to begin a new life alone, in a rough hut on the north-west shore of Walden Pond. Walden is Thoreau's classic autobiographical account of this experiment in solitary living. This new edition of Walden traces the sources of Thoreau's reading and thinking and considers the author in the context of his birthplace and his sense of its history - social, economic a