Thoreau's Reading charts Henry Thoreau's intellectual growth and its relation to his literary career from 1833, when he entered Harvard College, to his death in 1862. It also furnishes a catalogue of nearly fifteen hundred entries of his reading, compiled from references and allusions in his published writings, journal, correspondence, library charging records, the catalogue of his personal library, and his many unpublished notebooks and commonplace books. This record suggests his literary and intellectual development as a youth primarily interested in classical and early English literature, who matured as a writer investigating contemporary and classical natural science, the history of the European discovery and exploration of North America, and the history of native Americans.

The catalogue provides bibliographical data for, and lists all Thoreau's references to, the books and articles that he read. The introductory essay traces the shifts in his literary career marked in the chronology of his reading. The book reveals a Thoreau who was deeply interested in and conversant with the major intellectual questions of his times and whose stance of withdrawal from his age masked a lively involvement with many of its most perplexing questions.

Originally published in 1988.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Thoreau's Reading charts Henry Thoreau's intellectual growth and its relation to his literary career from 1833, when he entered Harvard College, to his death in 1862. It also furnishes a catalogue of nearly fifteen hundred entries of his reading, compiled from references and allusions in his published writings, journal, correspondence, library charging records, the catalogue of his personal library, and his many unpublished notebooks and commonplace books. This record suggests his literary and intellectual development as a youth primarily interested in classical and early English literature, who matured as a writer investigating contemporary and classical natural science, the history of the European discovery and exploration of North America, and the history of native Americans. The catalogue provides bibliographical data for, and lists all Thoreau's references to, the books and articles that he read. The introductory essay traces the shifts in his literary career marked in the chronology of his reading. The book reveals a Thoreau who was deeply interested in and conversant with the major intellectual questions of his times and whose stance of withdrawal from his age masked a lively involvement with many of its most perplexing questions. Originally published in 1988. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Volume two of the Journal includes Thoreau's extensive reminiscences of his 1839 excursion with his brother John along the Concord and Merrimack rivers and all his first impressions and observations entered in journals during the famous Walden sojourn. Collectively, these journals illustrate the middle stage of Thoreau's literary career--a stage noteworthy for his "devotion to the mastery of his craft" as evidenced by the progressive, intermingled drafts of "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers" and "Walden," "Thomas Carlyle and His Works," "Wendell Phillips Before Concord Lyceum," and "Ktaadn, and the Maine Woods." More than half of the material presented in Journal 2 is previously unpublished.

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.

This volume spans a period of rapid change in Thoreau's life and literary career, including the publication of his first book and a crisis in his friendship with Emerson, during which the Journal assumes its mature form as the extensive, regular, and dated record of his studies of and reflections on the natural and human life of the Concord region.

Designed for the general reader, this set presents literature not as a simple inventory of authors or titles but rather as a historical and cultural field viewed from a wide array of contemporary perspectives. The set, which is "new historicist" in its approach to literary criticism, endorses the notion that not only does history affect literature, but literature itself informs history.