Walden Summary

In his first chapter, "Economy," Thoreau introduces his purpose in writing the book, saying he
intends to answer questions people have asked about his reasons for living alone in a cabin in the
woods near Walden Pond for two years. He explains that most people live their lives as if
sleeping, blindly following the ways of their parents, and become trapped into these lives by
owning property and slaving in jobs to maintain their way of life. In contrast, he sought to
discover the true necessities of life and built a cabin, for the cost of $28. 12 _ near Walden Pond,
where he lived for two years, beginning in the summer of 1845. Making a profit of $8.71 _ by
selling the beans he grew and working occasionally at odd jobs, he found he was able to support
himself with very little work and much time for contemplation of himself and nature.
Thoreau, in the second chapter, "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For," talks about how he once
considered buying the Hollowell farm for himself but the purchase fell through. Instead, he
created a new existence for himself at Walden, where he found joy and fulfillment in nature, truly
awakening in his mornings there, while most of society remains perpetually asleep, living mean
lives when the possibility of a much better life is possible. The key to achieving such a life, he
says, is simplicity. In the third chapter, "Reading," Thoreau describes how he derives
enlightenment from reading Homer and other great writers, men who spoke of the truth and
speak of life in terms too noble for most to understand. Most of society, however, is not content
to strive after such truths and instead wastes their time reading popular fiction and newspapers,
when they should instead be dedicated to improving the intellectual culture, making the village
of Concord become a university.
However, as Thoreau relates in the fourth chapter, "Sounds," he spent his time during his first
summer at Walden hoeing beans, rather than reading, or sitting all morning watching and
listening to the birds. That reverie is broken by the whistle and rumble of the passing train, which
reminds Thoreau of the destruction of nature and country life by progress and industrialization.
In the evening, the hoots of the owls make him melancholy, reminding him of human cries of
sorrow. In the fifth chapter, "Solitude," Thoreau feels so much a part of nature that he scoffs at
the suggestion of one of his townsmen that he might be lonely at Walden. Instead, he relates his
distaste at village life, where people see too much of each other, so that human interaction
becomes trivial. In the sixth chapter, "Visitors," Thoreau is pleased that those who would bother
him with trivial matters don't visit him at Walden. Instead, his visitors are Canadian woodcutter,
whose straightforward thinking and love of life please Thoreau. Other visitors include half-wits
from the almshouse, who Thoreau thinks are more intellectual than most overseers, and men of
business, who no longer really enjoy nature. The happiest people to visit the pond are children
and young women.
In chapter seven, "The Bean-field," Thoreau describes how he hoed and tended two acres of
beans, some of which he sold, for a profit of $8.71 _. Though passing farmers criticized him for
not using a plow or fertilizer, having to work so long and hard made him grow close to the soil,
truly enjoying his work rather than seeing it as a means of profit, like most farmers. The eighth
chapter, "The Village," recounts Thoreau's discomfort in visiting town every few days, where
people's stares and thirst for gossip are invasive and where the attractions of pubs, stores, and
shops are a temptation. He is always relieved to return home to his cabin but worries that society
will seek one out wherever he goes. One day, he went to the village to go to the cobbler and was
arrested for not paying taxes to a government which supports slavery. He spent a night in jail.
(The experience would prompt Thoreau's essay "Civil Disobedience.")
Living in the woods, Thoreau devotes his time to experiencing nature, as he describes in chapter

nine, "The Ponds" sometimes fishing with an elderly man who is hard-of-hearing and sometimes
floating about in his boat playing his flute. He gives detailed descriptions of surrounding bodies
of water Flint's Pond, White Pond, Goose Pond, and Fair-Haven Bay but finds Walden, with its
pure clear water, to be the epitome of nature's offerings. In chapter ten, "Baker Farm," Thoreau
describes a visit to go fishing at Baker Farm. When caught in a rain shower, he takes refuge in
the hut of Irish "bogger" John Field and his family. Though he tries to convince Field that a
simpler, easier life could be attained with far less work, Field cannot conceive of such a
possibility. When the rain stops, he even does extra work to catch fewer fish than Thoreau.
In the book's eleventh chapter, "Higher Laws," Thoreau describes a feeling of animality that
occasionally comes across him, making him want to devour a woodchuck raw. He sees in
himself duelling impulses, to animality and to spirituality, and seeks to strengthen his spiritual
self, refraining from hunting or eating meat. He hopes that boys who hunt will grow to be men
who appreciate nature on spiritual level. Chapter twelve, "Brute Neighbors," opens with a
dialogue between Hermit, who represents Thoreau's contemplative nature, and Poet, who tempts
him to abandon his meditations and fish instead. He goes on to describe his animal neighbors,
including friendly mice and partridges, as well as a war he witnessed between red and black ants
and a loon who he followed around the pond in his boat but could never catch.
Chapter thirteen, "House-warming," begins Thoreau's description of the winter months. As the
weather grows colder in October and November, he builds a chimney and plasters the inside of
his walls. When the pond freezes, he studies the bottom of the lake and the formation of ice
bubbles within the ice itself. In the fourteenth chapter, "Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors,"
nature is all but silent and snow prevents Thoreau from venturing out much. He instead reflects
on the former inhabitants of the woods, including former slaves, Cato Ingraham, Zilpha, and
Brister and Fenda Freeman, and an Irishman Hugh Quoil. Only a few remnants of their houses
chimney stones and covered wells remain. Sometimes Thoreau ventures out for walks, once
seeing a seemingly-inactive owl who suddenly flies away, and returns home to find visitors,
including a farmer, a poet, and a peddlar-philosopher.
In chapter fifteen, "Winter Animals," Thoreau describes looking at the transformed landscape
from the centers of lakes and seeing it in a new light and hearing animals, including owls and
foxes chased by hounds. One day, he sees a rabbit which looks miserable to him until it leaps
away, clearly a strong and worthy part of nature. In chapter sixteen, "The Pond in Winter," he
awakens one morning after a night of questioning to realize that nature is serene and asks no
questions. He cuts holes in the ice of Walden, measuring the depth of the pond, which some
people have called bottomless. In January, Irish laborers working for a rich man arrive to cut and
cart away the ice to sell. This upsets Thoreau, until he realizes people all over the world will
have a taste of Walden. The lake soon refreezes. In chapter seventeen, "The Thaw," the lake
gradually begins to crack and groan and break apart. Thoreau describes in great detail the sand
which breaks through the snow and flows like foliage down the banks of the railroad. The birds
begin to return and the trees become greener. Soon, summer comes, and after two years at
Walden, Thoreau leaves.
In his "Conclusion," Thoreau explains he left Walden because he had many more lives to live. He
urges his readers to turn inward on immense spiritual journeys of self-discovery; to find
fulfillment in nature rather than riches; and to avoid conformity and live his own life as he must.
He concludes with the story of a bug which emerged from the wood of a table after sixty years
and hopes that human beings will likewise awaken and emerge into a new life.

Civil Disobedience
During his stay at Walden Pond (later to become the subject of his published journal Walden, or
Life in the Woods), Thoreau spent one night in jail for refusing to pay a poll tax meant to support
America's war with Mexico. He composed a letter from jail that he would later integrate into
Civil Disobedience, published in 1849 under the title Resistance to Civil Government. (It is
interesting to note that the term "civil disobedience" does not appear in the actual essay.)
Thoreau's incarceration brought him firsthand knowledge of the coercive and oppressive tactics
used by government to compel its citizens into support of immoral and unjust policies. But it also
highlighted the importance of individual moral conscience. The experience became the point of
departure for Thoreau's much broader reflection on the duty of civil disobedience.
In addition to the war with Mexico, slavery is a chief concern in Thoreau's essay. He extends the
logic of his argument about civil disobedience to include any cause that might violate an
individual's sense of moral conscience. At the time of publication, the country was deeply
divided along regional (and racial) lines over the question of slavery. The New England AntiSlavery Society had been founded in 1832, and by the 1840s, Boston and the town of Concord
where Thoreau lived for most of his life were considered bastions of abolitionist sentiment. Civil
Disobedience was first delivered on January 26, 1848 as a lecture at the Concord Lyceum, a
center of education for reform-minded thinkers and citizens. While the need for abolition seems
morally self-evident by contemporary standards, the issue of slavery in the 1840s and 1850s did
not command a unified opinion among many white Americans, even in northern states. Thoreau's
essay made it clear that all citizens are morally implicated in the oppression practiced by a
government even if indirectly affected by it.
Thoreau's landmark essay has had a profound and well-documented influence on intellectual
figures such as the Russian author Leo Tolstoy, Indian peace activist Mohandas Gandhi, black
civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., on the British Labor Movement and the American
political landscape more generally in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. King's Letter from
Birmingham Jail (1963), while containing no direct reference to it, clearly mimics the format of
Thoreau's own letter from jail, and relies on the essay's endorsement of civil disobedience as a
legitimate response to oppressive government policies.
Thoreau opens his essay with the motto "That government is best which governs least." His
distrust of government stems from the tendency of the latter to be "perverted and abused" before
the people can actually express their will through it. A case in point is the Mexican war (18461848, which extended slavery into new US territories), orchestrated by a small lite of
individuals who have manipulated government to their advantage against popular will.
Government inherently lends itself to oppressive and corrupt uses since it enables a few men to
impose their moral will on the majority and to profit economically from their own position of
authority. Thoreau views government as a fundamental hindrance to the creative enterprise of the
people it purports to represent. He cites as a prime example the regulation of trade and
commerce, and its negative effect on the forces of the free market.
A man has an obligation to act according to the dictates of his conscience, even if the latter goes
against majority opinion, the presiding leadership, or the laws of society. In cases where the
government supports unjust or immoral laws, Thoreau's notion of service to one's country
paradoxically takes the form of resistance against it. Resistance is the highest form of patriotism

because it demonstrates a desire not to subvert government but to build a better one in the long
term. Along these lines, Thoreau does not advocate a wholesale rejection of government, but
resistance to those specific features deemed to be unjust or immoral.
In the American tradition, men have a recognized and cherished right of revolution, from which
Thoreau derives the concept of civil disobedience. A man disgraces himself by associating with a
government that treats even some of its citizens unjustly, even if he is not the direct victim of its
injustice. Thoreau takes issue with William Paley, an English theologian and philosopher, who
argues that any movement of resistance to government must balance the enormity of the
grievance to be redressed and the "probability and expense" of redressing it. It may not be
convenient to resist, and the personal costs may be greater than the injustice to be remedied;
however, Thoreau firmly asserts the primacy of individual conscience over collective
pragmatism.
Thoreau turns to the issue of effecting change through democratic means. The position of the
majority, however legitimate in the context of a democracy, is not tantamount to a moral
position. Thoreau believes that the real obstacle to reform lies with those who disapprove of the
measures of government while tacitly lending it their practical allegiance. At the very least, if an
unjust government is not to be directly resisted, a man of true conviction should cease to lend it
his indirect support in the form of taxes. Thoreau acknowledges that it is realistically impossible
to deprive the government of tax dollars for the specific policies that one wishes to oppose. Still,
complete payment of his taxes would be tantamount to expressing complete allegiance to the
State. Thoreau calls on his fellow citizens to withdraw their support from the government of
Massachusetts and risk being thrown in prison for their resistance. Forced to keep all men in
prison or abolish slavery, the State would quickly exhaust its resources and choose the latter
course of action. For Thoreau, out of these acts of conscience flow "a man's real manhood and
immortality."
Money is a generally corrupting force because it binds men to the institutions and the
government responsible for unjust practices and policies, such as the enslavement of black
Americans and the pursuit of war with Mexico. Thoreau sees a paradoxically inverse relationship
between money and freedom. The poor man has the greatest liberty to resist because he depends
the least on the government for his own welfare and protection.
After refusing to pay the poll tax for six years, Thoreau is thrown into jail for one night. While in
prison, Thoreau realizes that the only advantage of the State is "superior physical strength."
Otherwise, it is completely devoid of moral or intellectual authority, and even with its brute
force, cannot compel him to think a certain way.
Why submit other people to one's own moral standard? Thoreau meditates at length on this
question. While seeing his neighbors as essentially well-intentioned and in some respects
undeserving of any moral contempt for their apparent indifference to the State's injustice,
Thoreau nonetheless concludes that he has a human relation to his neighbors, and through them,
millions of other men. He does not expect his neighbors to conform to his own beliefs, nor does
he endeavor to change the nature of men. On the other hand, he refuses to tolerate the status quo.
Despite his stance of civil disobedience on the questions of slavery and the Mexican war,
Thoreau claims to have great respect and admiration for the ideals of American government and
its institutions. Thoreau goes so far as to state that his first instinct has always been conformity.
Statesmen, legislators, politicians--in short, any part of the machinery of state bureaucracy--are
unable to scrutinize the government that lends them their authority. Thoreau values their
contributions to society, their pragmatism and their diplomacy, but feels that only someone

outside of government can speak the Truth about it.

The purest sources of truth are, in Thoreau's view, the Constitution and the Bible. Not
surprisingly, Thoreau holds in low esteem the entire political class, which he considers incapable
of devising the most basic forms of legislation. In his last paragraph, Thoreau comes full circle to
discussing the authority and reach of government, which derives from the "sanction and consent
of the governed." Democracy is not the last step in the evolution of government, as there is still
greater room for the State to recognize the freedom and rights of the individual. Thoreau
concludes on an utopic note, saying such a State is one he has imagined "but not yet anywhere
seen."