This illustrated edition of Walden features 66 photographs by Herbert W. Gleason, one of the great American landscape photographers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Gleason, who had a special love for what he called "the simple beauty of New England," became interested in Thoreau's work when commissioned in 1906 by the Houghton Mifflin Company to illustrate their edition of The Writings of Henry David Thoreau. With the help of the few surviving people who had known Thoreau, Gleason searched out the exact places Thoreau had described-all of them still looking much as they had when Thoreau knew them-and photographed them. Gleason became so interested in the project that he continued to photograph Thoreau country for more than forty years. Most of the photographs reproduced here were chosen by Gleason himself for an edition of Walden he planned but never published. Originally published in 1973. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) was an American naturalist, essayist, poet, and philosopher. He is best known for his book Walden and his essay "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience" (originally published as "Resistance to Civil Government"). Thoreau was a lifelong abolitionist, delivering lectures that attacked the fugitive slave law while praising the writings of Wendell Phillips and defending the abolitionist John Brown. Thoreau's philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced the political thoughts and actions of such notable figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. His writings on natural history and philosophy anticipated modern-day environmentalism.