Walden by Henry David Thoreau: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download

Walden is Henry David Thoreau’s account of two years and two months in a cabin he built himself on the shore of Walden Pond, a mile from Concord, Massachusetts, between 1845 and 1847. It is not a diary: the year is compressed into a single arc from summer to spring, and the chores, building, hoeing beans, plastering, cutting ice, keeping accounts, are turned into arguments about what a life costs and what it is for. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,” he writes, and the book is the report of that experiment, with its ledgers, its visitors and its long winter. The complete text is on Project Gutenberg.

Published in 1854, Walden sold slowly and was often read as the eccentricity of a man who disliked his neighbours; its reputation grew only after Thoreau’s death, and it is now the founding text of American nature writing and one of the few books people use as a manual for living rather than as a story. This page gives the complete text as a free EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB, together with chapter summaries, the characters and themes, and the history of the pond and of the book that made it famous.

• On Liberty — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
• Meditations — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB

Chapter summaries

The chapters of Walden in the order Thoreau arranged them in 1854 — each one a walk, a season, or an argument about how a life should be lived.

• Economy: The longest chapter, and the book’s argument about money. Thoreau explains that he lived alone in the woods for “two years and two months”, then asks what a house, clothes, food and fuel really cost in a man’s life. He reports his own accounts, a tight shingled house built for under thirty dollars, and argues that most people are poor because they have inherited expensive ideas of shelter: “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”. Farms, furniture and fashionable clothing are debts dressed up as necessities, and the railroad beside his bean field is laid on sleepers that were men, an Irishman or a Yankee, over whom the cars now run smoothly. His remedy is arithmetic rather than asceticism, and his definition of value is the chapter’s real thesis: “the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it.”
• Where I Lived, and What I Lived For: Thoreau chooses his site by imagining that he has bought every farm within a dozen miles, tasting wild apples and pricing pastures, until he decides that he holds “the refusal of several” and needs no deed to enjoy them. He describes building the house, the view from the hill above the pond, and the economy of living where one can leave. Then comes the book’s declaration of method: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” From that follows the chant, “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!”, and the mockery of the morning news. He praises dawn and the waking of the senses, and ends by arguing that a man is rich in proportion to what he can afford to let alone.
• Reading: A defence of reading as a discipline rather than a pastime. Thoreau complains that his townsmen learn to read “only as far as Easy Reading”, the primers, newspapers and story books, and never attempt the classics in their own language, still less in Greek or Latin, which he thinks any New Englander could acquire for the price of a few tools. “Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations,” he writes, and they must be read as deliberately as they were written, in the morning, with the head clear. He has Homer on his table and a village that buys libraries without readers, and the reproach falls on himself as much as on Concord: he too has been reading only the easy books.
• Sounds: Having argued for silence, Thoreau gives a chapter to noise. He puts aside his book and listens: the locomotive whistle, “sounding like the scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer’s yard”, the rattle of the cars carrying merchants to market, the village bells, a cow, a dog, the hooting of owls, and in summer “the whippoorwills chanted their vespers” on the stump by his door. The railroad, built during his stay, is the great event of the two years, and he watches it with the composure of a man who need not board. He reflects that “the echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it”, and prefers the local music to any news the trains bring.
• Solitude: An evening chapter written against the fear of being alone. Thoreau reports that he was never oppressed by solitude, except once, for an hour, a few weeks after he came; the pond, the rain and the wood give him company enough, and he finds a “sweet and beneficent society in Nature”. He describes sitting behind his door through a long northeast rain, and the strange doubleness by which a man can be a spectator of his own life. Then comes the sharp observation that “Society is commonly too cheap”: we meet at very short intervals without having acquired any new value for each other, and gossip three times a day is not conversation. Distance, he suggests, is what makes meeting worth anything.
• Visitors: The social chapter. Thoreau had “three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society”, and when more visitors arrived they sat on the floor. He sorts them by kind: children, fugitive slaves going north, and above all “a Canadian, a woodchopper and post-maker, who can hole fifty posts in a day”, a man so contented and so free of fuss that Thoreau calls him “a true Homeric or Paphlagonian man” and regrets that he cannot print his name. Their talk is of wood, weather and the price of things, and Thoreau finds more of Homer in it than in the village. The chapter defends a one-room house and the company that fits it.
• The Bean-Field: Hoeing, and what a cash crop is worth. Thoreau plants two and a half acres of beans on sandy ground near the pond, hoes the rows daily, hears the small army of the field, and keeps the accounts like a farmer. At the end he reports a pecuniary profit of eight dollars and seventy-one and a half cents, then subtracts the day-labour he might have done instead, so that the money nearly vanishes. “I came to love my rows, my beans,” he admits, though he could not eat them all and the woodchuck and the weeds took their share. The bean field is his emblem of work that can be measured, and of a market price that leaves the man’s life out of the sum.
• The Village: The reverse of the pond. Thoreau walks to Concord every day or two to hear the gossip, watches the shops and the courthouse, and comes home through the woods in the dark. He is no hermit by principle, and the village amuses him, but he notes that he was once “seized and put into jail” for refusing to pay a tax, and he treats the opinion of the town as something to be weighed rather than obeyed. Walking home he observes that even in our most trivial walks we are “constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons”, and that a man must be lost before he can find himself. The chapter is short, and quieter politically than the essay it points to.
• The Ponds: The longest scenic chapter, and the most beautiful. Thoreau surveys Walden and its neighbours, Flint’s, White, Goose and Fair Haven, giving depths, colours, shores and fish, and tells the legend that the pond takes its name from “one old squaw, named Walden”, the only survivor of a hill that shook and sank. He floats on the water through a summer forenoon, fishes at night, hears the frogs, and complains that “the woodcutters, and the railroad, and I myself have profaned Walden”. His praise is exact rather than rhapsodic: “A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.”
• Baker Farm: A walk in the rain to a poor farm. Thoreau shelters with John Field, an Irish labourer with a wife and several children, and preaches at him: one might fish, gather, go barefoot and drink water, and so work less. Field listens politely and cannot do it, “living, John Field, alas! without arithmetic, and failing so”, because he has taken on a mortgage, coffee, tea and the habits of his neighbours. Thoreau leaves in the rain, catches a fine string of fish, and is uneasy about his own sermon: the chapter examines the condescension of the reformer as much as the poverty of the farmer, and it does not settle the question in the reformer’s favour.
• Higher Laws: The most uncomfortable chapter, on appetite. Coming home at dusk with a string of fish, Thoreau meets a woodchuck crossing his path and feels “a strange thrill of savage delight”, a temptation to seize and devour it raw; he reads this as evidence of “the wild” in himself and refuses to call it simply base. He describes giving up meat, tea, coffee and spirits as experiments, finds animal food unclean and hard to justify, and argues for chastity, temperance and self-denial as the higher laws of the title. But he keeps fishing, and admits the pull of the senses. The chapter is a dialogue between the ascetic and the animal in one man, and Thoreau does not pretend that the argument closes.
• Brute Neighbors: A comic chapter, and the best proof that attention to animals is not sentimentality. It opens with a dialogue between a Hermit and a Poet, “I wonder what the world is doing now”, and then reports the battle of the ants on a woodpile: “the red republicans on the one hand, and the black imperialists on the other”, fighting with human fury over a few inches of ground. A loon leads Thoreau a long chase across the pond, diving and surfacing to laugh at him, and escapes; partridges, a woodchuck and a cat pass through the chapter. Thoreau measures men against animals and finds the animals, on the whole, the better company.
• House-Warming: Autumn, and the business of keeping warm. Thoreau goes “a-graping to the river meadows” and comes home loaded with clusters, builds a chimney, plasters the walls, and calculates that a fireplace costs less than a stove and gives better heat and light. He lays in wood, comparing pine, hickory and swamp timber, and welcomes the first frost as a test of the house he built himself with his own hands. He contrasts his cheap shelter with the costly houses of the town, and argues that shelter should be as plain as the need for it, since most houses are built for opinion rather than for warmth. The chapter ends as the pond begins to freeze and the cold season announces itself by sound.
• Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors: Winter, and the pond as a place with a history. Thoreau rehearses the people who lived in these woods before him: Cato Ingraham, “slave of Duncan Ingraham”, and Brister Freeman, the freedman whose apple orchard and cellar hole still mark the ground, with their lilac and their well. Then come the winter visitors who still climb the hill, a farmer, a poet, the Homeric woodchopper, and the long evenings of talk by the fire. He watches an owl he calls “winged brother of the cat”, half asleep on a bough, and notes that “I weathered some merry snow storms”. The chapter is the book’s quietest meditation on time, settlement and what outlasts a house.
• Winter Animals: The woods in deep winter, handed over to the animals. Thoreau follows fox tracks across the snow, hears the foxes bark “raggedly and demoniacally like forest dogs”, watches one carry off a hen and balance it “like a tiger with a buffalo”, and sees the hounds run a fox while the hunters close in and a shot ends it. Partridges come out of the woods morning and evening to feed at his wood-pile, red squirrels scold him from the trees, and small animals keep their runs under the snow. He walks out at dusk and finds the frozen ponds as strange and wide as “Baffin’s Bay”. The chapter is a naturalist’s notebook kept by a man with a hunter’s eye and no gun.
• The Pond in Winter: Ice, depth and measurement. Thoreau wakes before daylight and writes that “I awoke to an answered question, to Nature and daylight”; then he bores through the ice, sounds the pond, and reports that “the greatest depth was exactly one hundred and two feet”, correcting for the five feet the water has risen since his survey. He takes the temperature at different depths and maps the shape of the bottom. The ice-cutters arrive and tell him they can cut “a thousand tons” in a good day for the Boston trade, stacking it under hay to be sold as Walden water. The chapter is the most factual in the book and the most symbolic: to measure the pond is also to take the measure of the man measuring it.
• Spring: The thaw, and the book’s climax. Thoreau watches the ice go out of the pond and the sand and clay flow down the railroad cut, and says he felt as if he “stood in the laboratory of the Artist who made the world and me”, the bank below him a “creation of an hour”. He connects the melting of the earth with the thawing of his own winter, reports the first birds and frogs, and sees the geese circle over the pond, “twenty-nine of them”, before they steer north. It is a resurrection scene written by a surveyor: the physical facts of spring are made to carry the argument that renewal is a law of the world and not merely a consolation for it.
• Conclusion: Thoreau leaves the woods “for as good a reason as I went there”: the experiment is finished, not abandoned. The last chapter refuses to let the reader reduce the book to a pond. “Thank Heaven, here is not all the world”, the wild goose travels further than any of us, and “the universe is wider than our views of it”. He tells the story of the artist of Kouroo, who refused to be hurried and made a perfect staff, and insists that “if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams” he will meet with unexpected success. He ends with the thawing of a new day: “the sun is but a morning star.”

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