walden argumentative essay

• History & Society
• Science & Tech
• Biographies
• Animals & Nature
• Geography & Travel
• Arts & Culture
• Games & Quizzes
• On This Day
• One Good Fact
• New Articles
• Lifestyles & Social Issues
• Philosophy & Religion
• Politics, Law & Government
• World History
• Health & Medicine
• Browse Biographies
• Birds, Reptiles & Other Vertebrates
• Bugs, Mollusks & Other Invertebrates
• Environment
• Fossils & Geologic Time
• Entertainment & Pop Culture
• Sports & Recreation
• Visual Arts
• Demystified
• Image Galleries
• Infographics
• Top Questions
• Britannica Kids
• Saving Earth
• Space Next 50
• Student Center

• What is Transcendentalism?
• When did American literature begin?
• Who are some important authors of American literature?
• What are the periods of American literature?

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

• Humanities LibreTexts - From Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854)
• Internet Archive - "Walden; or, Life in the woods"
• Indiana University Pressbooks - Henry David Thoreau – Walden, or Life in the Woods

Recent News

Walden , series of 18 essays by Henry David Thoreau , published in 1854. An important contribution to New England Transcendentalism , the book was a record of Thoreau’s experiment in simple living on the northern shore of Walden Pond in eastern Massachusetts (1845–47). Walden is viewed not only as a philosophical treatise on labour, leisure, self-reliance, and individualism but also as an influential piece of nature writing. It is considered Thoreau’s masterwork.

Walden is the product of the two years and two months Thoreau lived in semi-isolation by Walden Pond near Concord , Massachusetts. He built a small cabin on land owned by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson and was almost totally self-sufficient, growing his own vegetables and doing odd jobs. It was his intention at Walden Pond to live simply and have time to contemplate, walk in the woods, write, and commune with nature. As he explained, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.” The resulting book is a series of essays, or meditations, beginning with “Economy,” in which he discussed his experiment and included a detailed account of the construction (and cost) of his cabin. Thoreau extolled the benefits of literature in “Reading,” though in the following essay , “Sounds,” he noted the limits of books and implored the reader to live mindfully, “being forever on the alert” to the sounds and sights in his or her own life. “Solitude” praised the friendliness of nature, which made the “fancied advantages of human neighborhood insignificant.” Later essays included “Visitors,” “Higher Laws,” “Winter Animals,” and “Spring.”

Relatively neglected during Thoreau’s lifetime, Walden achieved tremendous popularity in the 20th century. Thoreau’s description of the physical act of living day by day at Walden Pond gave the book authority, while his command of a clear, straightforward, but elegant style helped raise it to the level of a literary classic. Oft-repeated quotes from Walden include: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”; “Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes”; and “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.”

ENGL405: The American Renaissance

Essay on henry david thoreau and "walden".

You have already been introduced to Thoreau as a writer. Read this short essay on get a better sense of him as an activist.

On July 4, 1845, Henry David Thoreau took up residence in a cabin he had constructed on land owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson on the shores of Walden Pond, just outside of Concord, Massachusetts. For the next 27 months, Thoreau would live there, contemplating nineteenth-century American life and the world as a whole as it passed by, compiling notes and thoughts that would eventually form the basis of what has been considered his masterpiece , Walden . Organized around the calendar year, Walden consolidates Thoreau's two-year experience into one calendrical cycle, but it is far more than a memoir or a naturalist's report, moving from philosophical and political considerations to short sketches of the people and animals that move in and out of his life to rhapsodic celebrations of the pond and its environs to scientific data on its depth and its climate. To an extent none of his other writings do, Walden balances Thoreau's various interests and themes – understanding nature from a scientific and spiritual perspective, criticizing nineteenth-century U. S. materialism and inequality on the basis of natural laws and spiritual truth, and experimenting with language as a way of conveying those laws and truths in order to transform himself and his society.

Thoreau was born in 1817 in Concord, where he lived almost the entirety of his life. His family was fairly well off economically, as they owned one of the premier pencil-making factories in the nation. This financial security allowed Thoreau to attend Harvard, from which he graduated in 1837, in the midst of one of the worst financial panics of the nineteenth century. After resigning from his first job as a teacher because he refused to inflict corporal punishment, he opened a school with his brother John in Concord, which they ran together until 1841, when John became ill. After John's death in 1842, which would leave him without one of his closest companions, Thoreau took a teaching position in Staten Island as a way of gaining a foothold in the New York literary market. However, he would soon return to Concord. Following his experiment on Walden Pond, Thoreau continued in Concord, first living with the Emerson family for a short time, before returning to his family home, where he lived as a boarder until his death in 1862.

Early on, Thoreau came under the influence of Emerson and the transcendentalist circle, publishing essays and poetry in The Dial edited by Emerson and Margaret Fuller in the early 1840s, and living with Emerson from 1841 to 1843. While Emerson's influence can be felt in many of Thoreau's writings, their relationship was not always easy and Thoreau departs from Emerson in significant ways. Thoreau's time at Walden Pond and the experience he records of being jailed for not paying taxes in "Resistance to Civil Government" ("Civil Disobedience") can be readily understood as putting Emerson's philosophy of self-reliance into material practice. But as significant as that philosophical basis is to Thoreau's activity, the material nature of his activity may be more important. For Thoreau, the material world and his interaction with it become central in a way that the world never seems to be quite so real in Emerson's writings. While many of Emerson's essays and lectures tend to focus on abstract ideas, principles, and social positions as indicated by their very titles – "Self-Reliance", "Compensation", and "The Poet" – Thoreau's writings ground themselves in specific experience and particular locales, as indicated by the two books he published during his life time: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) and Walden .

Also unlike Emerson, who would achieve great fame as a lecturer and essayist, Thoreau would remain relatively obscure during his lifetime, even as he circulated among the most important literary circles of his age. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers was an infamous publishing failure – fewer than 300 of the original edition of 1000 books sold – but it helped to establish Thoreau's ability to weave philosophical insights and meditations, commentary on nature and history, into a narrative structure. Written during his time at Walden Pond, the book ostensibly chronicles the trip Thoreau and his brother John took in 1839. But Thoreau uses their journey both to mourn and remember his brother and to explore the philosophical and social questions at the core of his thought, the relationship between the self and nature, the history of Euro-American exploitation of American nature and its native inhabitants, and the connection between specific locales and times and the eternal and the universal.

During the same year of the publication A Week , Thoreau produced his most famous essay, "Resistance to Civil Government", better known now by the title "Civil Disobedience". "Resistance to Civil Government", with its argument that the individual conscience trumps man-made laws when those laws become the machinery of injustice, has influenced a number of important political activists, most famously Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. The essay uses Thoreau's experience of being imprisoned for one night in 1846 (during his sojourn at Walden Pond) for not paying his poll tax in protest of American policies, most importantly the U.S.-Mexican War and the continuation of slavery. In defending and explaining his conduct, Thoreau produces an individualistic, transcendentalist politics based on the inviolability of the individual conscience, a conscience or moral sense that potentially grants each of us access to a higher truth. This faith in the individual's ability to conduct himself properly through the use of an inner moral sense provides the foundation for the fundamentally anarchistic position Thoreau articulates at the beginning of the essay – "'That government is best which governs not at all;' and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have". Thoreau returns to his hope for a state that will all but cease to exist at the end of the essay and describes his ability and desire to escape contact with the government as much as possible, concluding his inserted history of his night in prison by recounting a huckleberry picking expedition that led him into nature where "the State was nowhere to be seen".

Yet much of the essay takes a more practical approach to the realities of the government in the antebellum U. S., with Thoreau even recognizing it as doing some good, as when he acknowledges paying the "highway tax:" "to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government". As much as Thoreau bases his radical individualism and anarchist tendencies in his transcendentalist philosophy, then, he is most concerned with the specific American government of his time and its policies. The fundamental problem with government is that it takes on a life of its own, becoming, in Thoreau's central metaphor in the essay, a machine that then attempts to treat individual men as machines lacking in thought or conscience. In articulating his more specific focus, he grounds his critique in American political thought, recalling the Revolution in order to contend that "All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable". While he seems to suggest that any violation of one's sense of justice by the government would validate resisting the state by withholding one's allegiance or by refusing to pay taxes, his argument largely relegates such extreme acts to only the most severe violation of right. He advises us to let certain injustices go: "If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go". And he makes it clear that he is not calling upon his fellow citizens to engage in a crusade to eliminate all evil: "It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong". Thoreau's point is not that slavery and what he – and many others – saw as an imperialistic war are wrong. There's much evil in the world, and it is beyond our capacity to eliminate it all.

What goads Thoreau to action is that the government that asks for his allegiance and support has created machinery for unjust purposes, as "oppression and robbery are organized" to support war and slavery. While Thoreau does not see it as his duty to oppose all injustice, he argues that "it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it . . . not to give it practically his support. . . . . I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue [my pursuits] sitting upon another man's shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too". Much of his critique is aimed at his many neighbors who ostensibly oppose slavery and the U. S.-Mexican War but do little in actuality to stop the federal government from continuing as it has and, in supporting the government, actually further the injustices they claim to oppose, thus "practically" giving their support. It is here that he dismisses voting as an empty gesture because the voter does not fully invest himself in the outcome of the vote. This is where civil disobedience becomes necessary, for the individual must make his "life a counter friction to stop the machine" of injustice by attempting to clog up the wheels of the government's machinery: "Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence". If each person who thought slavery or the U.S.-Mexican War was wrong withheld support for the government, Thoreau contends, the government would have to relent rather than jailing thousands of citizens. While this idea of nonviolent resistance became one of the most influential parts of Thoreau's political thought, he moved away from this position as the nation stumbled closer and closer to Civil War. Specifically, in his eulogistic essays on John Brown, following his failed attempt at provoking a slave rebellion in Virginia, Thoreau celebrated Brown's ability to stir Northerners from their slumber, as "He has liberated many thousands of slaves, both North and South". This figuring of his fellow Northerners as slaves – as enslaved to the system of slavery specifically and to social norms more broadly – connects this later apology for violence to "Resistance" where he similarly opines that slavery could only be abolished by voting when society has become "indifferent" to it and the voters themselves "will then be the only slaves".

As his more explicitly political writings frequently speak of his fellow citizens as slaves for their continuing support of slavery, Walden similarly equates those who "lead lives of quiet desperation" in which they have "no time to be any thing but a machine" to being "slave-driver[s]" of themselves. If slavery and industrialization provide the most prominent contexts for Thoreau's critique, Nature provides the antidote for these moral and social ailments. Most pronouncedly, he announces his social project in terms of his fellow Americans being asleep: "I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up". For Thoreau, especially in the second chapter of Walden , "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For", morning becomes a figure for the ever-present possibility of waking to "a poetic or divine life" through both the imaginative constitution of the world and direct contact with its material reality.

Much of Walden consists of Thoreau's meditations on his experiment in Spartan living, an experiment based in an attempt at discovering exactly what a man needs to live, materially and spiritually, and his focus is largely on discerning his place within nature and, through it, within the universe. Yet running through these more philosophical and, at times, scientific threads is a steady critique of American society – "this restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century" – for having misplaced priorities due to a failure of imagination and perspective. While not as explicitly political as "Resistance" or his essays and lectures on slavery, Walden takes aim both at specific injustices and at the broader social and ideological underpinnings of those injustices. Among other things, Thoreau, for example, attacks industrialized labor for merely seeking "that the corporations may be enriched" and repeatedly gestures to the travesty of Southern slavery. But the basis for these critiques lies in his returning to nature and a world that exists outside the nineteenth century and its narrow interests, allowing him the perspective to see the limitations of his time.

It is through his deeper engagement, his "closest acquaintance with Nature", that Thoreau discovers the higher laws that guide his critique of American society. In particular, in the chapter "Higher Laws", Thoreau attempts to link the higher "spiritual life" with "a primitive", more "rank hold on life", even as he recognizes these instincts as quite distinct. He argues that it is through his experiences in the wild, that he gains access to "the most original part of himself", through a kind of "clarifying process". In "Spring", he famously describes such a clarifying process within nature itself through his description of the thawing of the railroad bank. As with his depiction of morning as reflecting the awakening of the self to the world, so with "Spring" he offers an account of the world coming back to life. Viewing the bank, he feels as if he "stood in the laboratory of the Artist who made the world and me". This experience leads him to meditate on the connections between various material phenomena and language, captured in the repeated form of leaves, as he concludes that "it seemed that this one hillside illustrated the principle of all the operations of Nature". "Spring" concludes with images that suggest the unimportance of human or any specific animal's existence within nature, as Thoreau defends and celebrates nature's extravagance, the fact that "Nature is so rife with life that myriads can be afforded to be sacrificed" – "tadpoles which herons gobble up, and tortoises and toads run over in the world". Yet nature also provides the springboard for transforming human life – both in general, in a particular society, and for the individual – for it enables us to recognize that this earth and "the institutions upon it, are plastic" and to see "our own limits transgressed" by its "inexhaustible vigor, vast and Titanic features". It is this emphasis on continually transgressing our limits as our experience with nature repeatedly reminds us that leads Thoreau to leave Walden Pond. As he famously puts it, "I had several more lives to live", and during his time at Walden he had already made "a beaten track" between his cabin and the pond and a similar path "which the mind travels". Nature, Thoreau suggests, helps to correct our tendency to fall into the same paths, the same routines, and as such it can help to reorient ourselves as individual and as a society.

Suggested Additional Reading

Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Cavell, Stanley. The Senses of Walden. Expanded ed. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981.

Milder, Robert. Reimagining Thoreau. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Myerson, Joel, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Richardson, Robert D., Jr. Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986

Robinson, David M. Natural Life: Thoreau's Worldly Transcendentalism. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004.

Walls, Laura Dassow. Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995.

• About WordPress
• Get Involved
• WordPress.org
• Documentation
• Learn WordPress
• Take a Tour

Special Pages

• Readers’ Thoreau Home
• General Discussion
• Thoreau Society AG 2016
• Translating Thoreau
• How to read this Text
• General Comments
• All Comments
• Comments by Commenter
• Featured Comments
• Liked Comments

Table of Contents

Title page – 1854 edition.

• Economy 1-14
• Economy 15-29
• Economy 30-44
• Economy 45-58
• Economy 59-70
• Economy 71-81
• Economy 82-97
• Economy 98-111
• Complemental Verses
• Where I Lived, And What I Lived For 1-12
• Where I Lived, And What I Lived For 13-23
• Sounds 1-11
• Sounds 12-22
• Visitors 1-11
• Visitors 12-18
• The Bean-Field 1-8
• The Bean-Field 9-17
• The Village
• The Ponds 1-17
• The Ponds 18-34
• Higher Laws
• Brute Neighbors 1-9
• Brute Neighbors 10-18
• House-Warming 1-9
• House-Warming 10-19
• Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors 1-12
• Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors 13-24
• Winter Animals
• The Pond in Winter 1-10
• The Pond in Winter 11-21
• Spring 1-13
• Spring 14-26
• Conclusion 1-9
• Conclusion 10-19
• Works Cited A-G
• Works Cited H-P
• Works Cited R-Z
• Previous page

December 18, 2013

Filter comments by group

0 comments on the whole page.

Create an account to leave a comment

4 Comments on paragraph 1

Posted in: Panel of Experts

[WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS]

Although the first edition gives the title Walden; or, Life in the Woods , on March 4, 1862, two months before he died, T wrote to his publishers, Ticknor & Fields, asking them to omit the subtitle in a new edition. They complied with this request, although it has rarely been followed since. Paul (75) suggests that T may have dropped the subtitle because he feared his audience was taking it too literally and thus missing the more important philosophy permeating the book. T could have derived the subtitle from his friend Charles Lane’s essay “Life in the Woods” in the Dial (IV, 1844, 415) or from John S. Williams, “Our Cabin; or, Life in the Woods” in the October 1843 American Pioneer (DeMott), but not from the then popular  The Adirondack; or Life in the Woods , by J.T. Headley (New York, 1849), which did not appear until after T had used the subtitle in an advertisement for W in the back pages of the first edition of  A Week.  For a comprehensive study of the types of books on which T based the structure of W, see Linck Johnson. For a discussion of the organic structure of W, see Lane (1960). Kurtz is one o the most straightforward analyses of W’s style.

Posted in: General Discussion

Is there any possibility of Thoreau borrowing from the Christian tradition and positing “the woods” as a corollary of “wilderness”, where the demons (in us) are often portrayed and living? To reach one’s “higher self”, one must wake up inwardly to those elements that lead the soul (psychological and emotional state) astray.

In his new book, Cryptic Subtexts in Literature and Film: Secret Messages and Buried Treasure (New York: Routledge, 2019), Steven F. Walker offers a new interpretation of Walden ’s 1854 subtitle, “Life in the Woods.” It is well known that that subtitle was hardly original, having appeared in several publications prior to the publication of Walden , including an article of that name by Charles Lane which appears in the final issue of The Dial . Walker grants that Thoreau may have used the title “ironically,” that is, “as a vigorous rejoinder to the thesis of Lane’s Dial essay” (13). More intriguing, however, is Walker’s argument that Thoreau may have associated “life in the woods” with a phase of life known in Hindu as “vanaprastha” (literally translated as “life in the woods”)—“the third stage of life—that of the solitary, contemplative hermit living in the forest on the outskirts of the village—as described in The Laws of Manu ” (14) which Thoreau read in Emerson’s library in 1840. “Such a new framing,” Walker says, “certainly provides a new perspective on Thoreau’s life-in-the-woods enterprise, which, for all its Yankee originality, also can be seen as a spiritual retreat based on an ancient Hindu paradigm of the stages of life” (16).

Caroline Crimmins Paragraph 1: Last semester I took Professor Cooper’s English 368 Connections in Recent Literature: Unplugged and ParaDigitial class and examined the relationship between books and technology. On the first day of class, we talked about how Thoreau was actually much closer to civilization than it seems in his writing. Although I cannot find the original map that I saw on my first day of class, this map also demonstrates that even though Thoreau was somewhat “tucked away” he was still decently close to civilization. He talks about occasionally catching people off the train to hear the town’s gossip, something he cannot resist. He also mentions occasionally wandering into town for the human connection that he sometimes yearned for. I believe that this is an interesting point to bring into his first chapter “Economy” because he talks to the reader about how he builds his own house that is meant to be so distant from society but in reality it is quite the opposite. This relates strongly to technology today because even people that claim they want to be distant from the innovations we are creating as a society are still somehow connected to technology in some way. Technology has a huge influence on our society and there is almost no way of having total seclusion from the world or from the devices we have invented and are still working on today.  

Find references in JSTOR articles

0 Comments on paragraph 2

0 comments on paragraph 3, 1 comment on paragraph 4.

The drawing of T’s cabin was made by his sister Sophia, an amateur artist. T himself complained of it, “Thoreau would suggest a little alteration, chiefly in the door, in the wide projection of the roof at the front; and that the bank more immediately about the house be brought out more distinctly” (Sanborn, 1917, 338). Sanborn adds, “He must have noticed that her trees were firs and pines, with a few deciduous tress that did not then grow there.” Ellery Channing thought it a “feeble caricature.” Other contemporary drawings of the cabin may be found in Meltzer and Harding (144-5).

1 Comment on paragraph 5

[to wake my neighbors up]

The epigraph is quoted from the second chapter of W. It is omitted from many modern editions, and unfortunately so, for it sets the mood for the whole book. Broderick (1954) points out how this awakening and morning theme is a basic image carried throughout W. A possible source for T’s idea is Orestes Brownson’s statement in his  Boston Quarterly Review in 1839 that he “aimed to startle, and made it a point to be as paradoxical and extravagant as he could.”

0 Comments on paragraph 6

Leave a comment, recent comments on this page.

February 12, 2020 at 12:53 pm

See in context

February 17, 2019 at 5:50 pm

December 17, 2014 at 4:55 pm

January 3, 2014 at 5:22 pm

January 3, 2014 at 5:18 pm

January 3, 2014 at 5:25 pm

Most liked comments on this page

Recent comments in this text.

October 13, 2022 at 1:16 am

Posted in: Emerson-Thoreau SUNY Geneseo

I am a life long reader of Thoreau Walden. I have translated this book into Persian and published it in Iran too. I would always like to discuss this eternal book with fellow American readers. I love this connection. Here is some food for thought and a good subject for discussion:

We live on a planet. Any life similar to ours must naturally form on a planet. Why then Thoreau is referring to the inhabitants of a star? What form of life is conceivable on a star:

How far apart, think you, dwell the two most distant inhabitants of yonder star, the breadth of whose disk cannot be appreciated by our instruments?

March 19, 2022 at 1:10 pm

Okay I have been reading Paradice lost By John Milton, however me though on this line is what if it is an experiment? That is what fascinates me about society is that it is a giant social experiment that we live every day. That we as people have to work together in this world to survive.

February 25, 2022 at 10:30 am

Posted in: SNHUmans

Oftentimes people attribute small homes to a sense of closeness or homeliness. However, Thoreau attributes it to a stuffy environment, one where people can’t voice their thoughts clearly because there isn’t enough room.

February 25, 2022 at 10:27 am

A paragraph full of Greek mythology allusions, the gods he includes are all associated with medicine and healing of some kind. Curiously enough, he doesn’t include Apollo himself, the god of medicine.

February 25, 2022 at 9:58 am

An overview of Thoreau’s minimalist thoughts, he does mention Confucius teachings many times throughout Walden. From there he establishes that in life, a person doesn’t need a strict timetable of their day. Rather, living in the moment and taking your time to meander about is the best way to live.

February 25, 2022 at 1:09 am

The best example of Thoreau’s scientific observations, without his detailed notes we wouldn’t have a good idea of what the environment was like during the 1800s.

February 25, 2022 at 1:04 am

An interesting dialogue between Thoreau and the many poets of the time. The main topic of discussion between the two parties seems to be work, and how much work should be done to receive rewards and favors. In this case, it seems that only a minimal amount should be expected. The poet collects bait for fishing, while the hermit fishes. In the end, the two enjoy each other’s company as friends with the transaction of labor complete.

February 25, 2022 at 12:52 am

A long paragraph describing Walden Pond, it shows Thoreau’s journalistic side very well. He establishes a humble scene for the pond in comparison to the sea, yet still manages to give it a flair that shines in its own way that entices the reader to visit the pond in an instant.

February 25, 2022 at 12:44 am

Thoreau’s view here is very optimistic, with the opinion that people will do no harm if there isn’t an expectation of harm. And in his case, that philosophy has held out. However, one has to ask, with today’s standards in both a moral and societal stance, would that philosophy still hold true?

February 25, 2022 at 12:38 am

In the infinite dark one can find themself and what their place in the world is. Only by disconnecting from what we find familiar can we tread a new path that leads us to the “strangeness of Nature”. What Thoreau means to say is that when we are away from what we know, we can find new things about ourselves in a spiritual sense.

Untitled Widget

Register to join a group and leave comments.

Source: https://commons.digitalthoreau.org/walden/

• Ask LitCharts AI
• Discussion Question Generator
• Essay Prompt Generator
• Quiz Question Generator

• Literature Guides
• Poetry Guides
• Shakespeare Translations
• Literary Terms

Henry David Thoreau

Ask LitCharts AI: The answer to your questions

• Quizzes, saving guides, requests, plus so much more.

82 pages • 2 hours read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Chapters 10-12

Chapters 13-15

Chapters 16-18

Key Figures

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Discussion Questions

With its emphasis on self-sufficient living and rugged individualism,  Walden  aligns with a range of political philosophies. Do you feel Thoreau’s political views connect to any current system of political thought? Why or why not?

Walden  is an eclectic mix of forms, including poetry, philosophical musings, local lore and histories, and quotes from a wide range of sources. Why do you think Thoreau combined so many different forms, and how do they converse and interact with one another?

Prominent Chinese and Indian philosophers make repeated appearances throughout the text. Choose at least three significant mentions of Chinese or Indian philosophy and analyze how these philosophies shape the book.

Related Titles

By Henry David Thoreau

A Plea for Captain John Brown

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

Civil Disobedience

Featured Collections

American Literature

View Collection

Summer Reading

Transcendentalism

Welcome to the new OASIS website! We have academic skills, library skills, math and statistics support, and writing resources all together in one new home.

• Walden University
• Faculty Portal

Using Evidence: Paraphrase

Paraphrasing sources video playlist.

Basics of Paraphrasing

A successful paraphrase is your own explanation or interpretation of another person's ideas. Paraphrasing in academic writing is an effective way to restate, condense, or clarify another author's ideas while also providing credibility to your own argument or analysis. Successful paraphrasing is essential for strong academic writing, and unsuccessful paraphrasing can result in unintentional plagiarism. Look through the paraphrasing strategies below to better understand what counts as an effective paraphrase.

In order for a reader to understand the impact of a direct quotation or paraphrased source material, you should work to integrate your evidence into your paragraph's overall discussion. A strong way to integrate source material is to use  transitions . As you integrate sources, you will also often begin  analyzing the evidence

Citing Paraphrases

• Paraphrased material must be cited. Even though paraphrasing means that you are restating information in your own words, you must give credit to the original source of the information.
• Citations for paraphrased material should always include both the author and the year. In-text citation can be placed within the sentence or at the end:

Example: According to Johnson (2012), mirror neurons may be connected with empathy and imitation.

Example: Mirror neurons may be connected with empathy and imitation in human beings (Johnson, 2012).

Note: Be sure to consider the frequency of your source citation when you are paraphrasing.

Integrating Paraphrases Into Your Paragraphs

Paragraph with paraphrased material not integrated.

The causes of childhood obesity are various. Greg (2005) found that children need physical activity to stay healthy. One study found that the amount of time spent in front of the television or computer had a direct correlation to an individual's BMI (Stephens, 2003). Parsons (2003) debated whether nature or nurture affects childhood obesity more. Scientists have linked genetics to obesity (Parsons, 2003). Parents often reinforce bad lifestyle habits (Parsons, 2003).

Here there is a list of paraphrased sentences, but again they seem to be missing any links or connections to show how the different ideas are related. Rather than simply using a list of paraphrased sentences from these sources, the author of the next example integrates each piece of information from the sources by using extra explanation or transitions.

Paragraph With Paraphrased Material, Revised (Revisions in Bold)

The causes of childhood obesity are various. Greg (2005) found that children need physical activity to stay healthy. However, children's inactive lifestyles and the time they spend in front of a screen seem to consume the time they could otherwise spend playing outdoors or involved in physical activities. In fact, this lack of physical activity has a direct effect on body mass index (BMI). One study found that the amount of time spent in front of the television or computer had a direct correlation to an individual's BMI (Stephens, 2003). Although screen time is correlated with high BMI, Parsons (2003) still debated whether nature or nurture affects childhood obesity more. Though Parsons admitted that scientists have linked genetics to obesity, he also explained that parents often reinforce bad lifestyle habits.

Adding transitions allows the author to make connections while still presenting the paraphrased source material.

Related Resources

Didn't find what you need? Email us at [email protected] .

• Previous Page: Summary
• Next Page: Effective Paraphrasing Strategies
• Office of Student Disability Services

Walden Resources

Departments.

• Academic Residencies
• Academic Skills
• Career Planning and Development
• Customer Care Team
• Field Experience
• Military Services
• Student Success Advising
• Writing Skills

Centers and Offices

• Center for Social Change
• Office of Academic Support and Instructional Services
• Office of Degree Acceleration
• Office of Research and Doctoral Services
• Office of Student Affairs

Student Resources

• Doctoral Writing Assessment
• Form & Style Review
• Quick Answers
• ScholarWorks
• SKIL Courses and Workshops
• Walden Bookstore
• Walden Catalog & Student Handbook
• Student Safety/Title IX
• Legal & Consumer Information
• Website Terms and Conditions
• Cookie Policy
• Accessibility
• Accreditation
• State Authorization
• Net Price Calculator
• Cost of Attendance
• Contact Walden

Walden University is a member of Adtalem Global Education, Inc. www.adtalem.com Walden University is certified to operate by SCHEV © 2024 Walden University LLC. All rights reserved.