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- CBS News
Saving Walden Pond: How a treasured landmark is under threat
A storied part of our national heritage, Walden Pond and Walden Woods in Massachusetts – where Henry David Thoreau wrote his 1854 classic "Walden" – has been named one of "America's 11 Most Endangered Historic Places" due to nearby development.
11 hours ago
- CBS News
This week on "Sunday Morning" (August 25)
A look at the features for this week's broadcast of the 2023 News & Documentary Emmy-winner for Outstanding Recorded News Program, hosted by Jane Pauley.
3 days ago
Jul 13, 2024 · Walden, series of 18 essays by Henry David Thoreau, published in 1854 and considered his masterwork. An important contribution to New England Transcendentalism, the book was a record of Thoreau’s experiment in simple living on Walden Pond in Massachusetts (1845–47).
Jul 8, 2024 · In the spring Thoreau picked a spot by Walden Pond, a small glacial lake located 2 miles (3 km) south of Concord on land Emerson owned. Early in the spring of 1845, Thoreau, then 27 years old, began to chop down tall pines with which to build the foundations of his home.
The Pond in Winter: Thoreau describes Walden Pond as it appears during the winter. He says he has sounded its depths and located an underground outlet. Then, he recounts how 100 laborers came to cut great blocks of ice from the pond to be shipped to the Carolinas.
Walden Pond by Henry David Thoreau. Walden, Thoreau's most famous writing articulating the essence of Transcendentalism, was published in 1854. The book, often read in grades 11-12, reflects Thoreau's attempt to 'live life simply.' A popular quote from its second chapter:
Jan 28, 2021 · When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only.
Walden; or, Life in the Woods is a nonfiction book about Thoreau's experience at Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts, from July 1845 to September 1847.
Thoreau finds that Walden Pond is no more than a hundred feet deep, thereby refuting common folk wisdom that it is bottomless. He meditates on the pond as a symbol of infinity that people need in their lives.
With these words, Henry David Thoreau began the tale of his experiment of simple living at Walden Pond. Over the course of the next three hundred-odd pages, Thoreau outlined his philosophy of life, politics, and nature, laying the foundation for a secure place in the canon of great American writers.
There is an old joke among Thoreauvians that most people know Thoreau as the man who spent half his life at Walden Pond and the other half in jail. The reason that his brief time at Walden and his one night in jail have become such defining moments in his life can be summed up under one term: Writer.
Thoreau builds his own small cabin, earns some money by working in his bean-field, and keeps meticulous financial records to demonstrate how little a man needs to live. When he chooses where to live and moves into his house, he celebrates becoming a part of nature and holds the pond sacred.
