The Thoreau You Don't Know

by Sullivan, Robert

• ISBN13: 9780061710322
• ISBN10: 0061710326
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-03-08
• Publisher: Perennial

Summary

A "New York Times" Editors' Choice Most readers think they know Henry David Thoreau: the solitary curmudgeon with the shack out in the woods. In this delightfully engaging book, Robert Sullivan gives us the Thoreau we "don't" know: the gregarious adventurer, the guy who liked to go camping with friends (even if they sometimes accidentally burned the woods down). Here is no lonely eccentric but a man who danced and sang, who worked throughout his short life at the family pencil-making business, who moved into his parents' house after leaving Walden Pond and always paid his father rent. Passionate yet whimsical, "The Thoreau You Don't Know" asks us to cast off our misconceptions as we reexamine our everyday relationship with the natural world and one another.

Author Biography

Robert Sullivan is the author of The Meadowlands, A Whale Hunt, Rats, and Cross Country. A contributing editor to Vogue, his writing has also appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, and Dwell magazine. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two children.

Table of Contents

The Thoreau You Don't Know	p. 1
Where He Was Coming From	p. 21
Reading Transcendental	p. 37
A Life With Principle	p. 58
A Free-Lance	p. 74
When the Woods Burned	p. 101
The Road to Walden	p. 122
A Place to Work	p. 153
Imagine a City	p. 188
After Walden	p. 226
Autumn	p. 259
Perfectly Distinct	p. 277
Acknowledgments	p. 319
Notes	p. 321
Index	p. 345
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.