This major study brings to light Thoreau's relation to the complex economic discourse of his time and place. Specifically, it examines the impact of transformations in economic thinking and behavior that occurred in antebellum New England and America; these transformations at the level of language; and Thoreau's awareness of these transformations. Neufeldt situates Thoreau in significant economic conditions of his time, investigating how these conditions contained him even as he sought to contain them. Using Walden and "Life without Principle," as main examples, the book considers the questions of why and how Thoreau, who was very much shaped by his culture and its conventions, also contested the limitations of those conventions and used his condition to transform some of them. Thoreau's identity as a literary artist who regarded his writing as his cultural vocation is at the center of the discussion.

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 both his interior life and his monumental studies of the natural history of his native Concord, Massachusetts. In contrast to earlier editions, the Princeton Edition reproduces the Journal in its original and complete form, in a reading text that is free of editorial interpolations but keyed to a comprehensive scholarly apparatus.

Despite activities as time-consuming and varied as urveying for the town of Concord and helping a fugitive slave escape to Canada, Thoreau wrote nearly eight hundred manuscript pages in his Journal during the eight months covered by this volume. Confirmed in his vocation as a natural historian, he began to compile the richly detailed records of Concord's woods, fields, and streams that would occupy him for the rest of his life, and he consciously shaped the Journal to reflect his new aims as a writer. He also began major revisions of his "Walden" that would lead to its publication in 1854.