Walking and Thinking with Thoreau

Abstract

First published nearly 150 years ago, Thoreau’s Excursions has recently been made available as a long-awaited installment of the standard Princeton Edition of The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, under the helm of senior editor and Thoreau scholar Joseph J. Moldenhauer. An eclectic anthology reissued in various guises over the years, the provenance of Excursions is complicated by its posthumous publication and seemingly variegated contents. Its initial 1863 edition comprises essays both published and unpublished, which read together span Thoreau’s entire writing career. Some of the texts included had, as far as we know, been left untouched by Thoreau for nearly twenty years. Others had evolved slowly through a succession of manuscripts and lecture deliveries; this while yet others were evidently assembled in some haste, from loose drafts and journal entries, as Thoreau braved his terminal illness during the early 1860s. Surface eclecticism aside, however