Laura Dassow Walls

Joel Myerson

Sandra Harbert Petrulionis

The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism offers an ecclectic, comprehensive interdisciplinary approach to the immense cultural impact of the movement that encompassed literature, art, architecture, science, and politics.

The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism

Henry David Thoreau

Robert Sattelmeyer

John C. Broderick

From 1837 to 1861, Thoreau kept a Journal that began as a conventional record of ideas, grew into a writer's notebook, and eventually became the principal imaginative work of his career. The source of much of his published writing, the Journal is also a record of his interior life and of his monumental studies of the natural history of his native Concord, Massachusetts. Unlike earlier editions, the Princeton edition reproduces the Journal in its original and complete form, in a reading text free of editorial interpolations but keyed to a comprehensive scholarly apparatus. Journal 8: 1854 is edited from the 467-page notebook that Thoreau kept February 13-September 3, 1854. It reveals him as an increasingly confident taxonomist creating lists that distill his observations about plant leafing and seasonal birds. Two particularly significant public events took place in his life in the summer of 1854. On July 4, at an antislavery rally at Framingham, Massachusetts, Thoreau appeared for the first time in the company of prominent abolitionists, delivering as heated a statement against slavery as he had yet made. And on August 9, Ticknor and Fields published Walden, the book Thoreau had been working on since 1846. In Journal 8 Thoreau indicates that these public accomplishments, though satisfying, took a toll on his creative life and did not fully compensate him for the hours spent away from the woods.

Journal

The forty-nine recollections gathered in Thoreau in His Own Time demonstrate that it was those who knew him personally, rather than his contemporary literati, who most prized Thoreau's message, but even those who disparaged him respected his unabashed example of an unconventional life. Included are comments by Ralph Waldo Emerson—friend, mentor, Walden landlord, and progenitor of the spin on Thoreau's posthumous reputation; Nathaniel Hawthorne, who could not compliment Thoreau without simultaneously denigrating him; and John Weiss, whose extended commentary on Thoreau's spirituality reflects unusual tolerance. Selections from the correspondence of Caroline Healey Dall, Maria Thoreau, Sophia Hawthorne, Sarah Alden Bradford Ripley, and Amanda Mather amplify our understanding of the ways in which nineteenth-century women viewed Thoreau. An excerpt by John Burroughs, who alternately honored and condemned Thoreau, asserts his view that Thoreau was ever searching for the unattainable.

Sandra Harbert Petrulionis

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