Over a century ago, Henry David Thoreau experience the life which shaped this remarkable book. "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. I lived there two years and two months... I went into the wooks 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." Thus simply did Thoreau present his credentials and lay down his course. He portrays America with its ageless beauty and intimately records it with a homespun philosophy.