Henry Thoreau “was fitted, or rather made unfit,” as he later said, for college at Concord Academy under the tutelage of Phineas Allen. The academy, which Thoreau himself would later conduct with his brother John, had been founded as a college preparatory school in 1822, and its curriculum was explicitly designed to prepare its students for the Harvard entrance examinations. There were the “English Branches,” where the scholars might study, depending upon the term and year, mathematics, composition and declamation, geography, history, and philosophy; but the primary emphasis was on languages: Latin, Greek, and French.¹ The entrance exams themselves, according...

During the years after his graduation from college, Thoreau grappled with the problem of vocation and felt his way tentatively toward a life in letters. Getting a living was never really a practical problem for him, for he could always (and indeed often did) work at the family pencil and graphite business, which gradually improved despite the economic hard times of the late thirties and early forties. The greater challenge than poverty was success, for he might easily have become prosperous by applying himself consistently rather than intermittently to this work. But the traditional professions open to college graduates—law,...

Following the publication ofA Week on the Concord and Merrimack Riversin May 1849, Thoreau’s life began a quiet transformation. Partly as a result of the reception of the book, but partly owing also to the development of new interests and a newfound stability in the routines of his life, his literary habits—his reading, especially—changed and began to settle into patterns that would remain more or less constant for the rest of his life. The failure ofA Weekto generate much critical or popular appreciation and the financial setback that its poor sales caused were both...

Such modest fame as Thoreau possessed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries derived mainly from his natural history writings, especially the four volumes of seasonal selections from his Journal, edited by H.G.O. Blake, that were issued at intervals during the eighties and nineties. Thoreau’s public popularity today is likewise maintained by his reputation as the author of pronouncements about the importance of preserving wild nature that have provided, as Roderick Nash has shown, the philosophical and programmatic cornerstones of conservation and preservation movements in this century.¹ But on the whole the rise of Thoreau’s literary reputation has tended...

Wοrks in the catalogue are listed alphabetically by author, or by title when no author has been identified or the work is anonymous. Titles and publication information for books are taken from theNational Union Catalogue of Pre-1956 Imprints(and on a few occasions from theBritish Museum Catalogue of Printed Booksand the catalogue of the Bibliothèque Nationale), and minor variations in the forms of reporting these data have not been normalized. Whenever verifiable, the edition cited is the one Thoreau used; otherwise, publication data for the most recent and readily accessible edition are listed. On the line following...