Henry David Thoreau

One of the most famous non-fiction American books, Walden by Henry David Thoreau is the history of Thoreau's visit to Ralph Waldo Emerson's woodland retreat near Walden Pond. Thoreau, stirred by the philosophy of the transcendentalists, used the sojourn as an experiment in self reliance and minimalism… "so as 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,