1. Alex Rinkus
Academic Research & Writing
Dr. Rasmussen
4/13/13
An Analysis of Various Book Reviews of Walden
Book reviews of Walden add an interesting dimension of understanding to the text
since they are intended for people who have not yet read the work, and are meant either to
recommend it to possible readers, or explain why they do not believe it is worth the
readers’ time. Being directed at the audience with a certain level of restraint for entering
into the text, these reviews often tell more about a book’s potential readership in the time
that they are written than the book itself. In the case of Walden, an examination of these
book reviews from different time periods reveals not so much a change as a commonality
between Thoreau’s readers through history, the remarkable endurance of his philosophy
even as society’s progress fostered more and more reluctance towards its reception.
Despite the underwhelming reception that Walden received monetarily when it was
originally published, there was an immediate recognition of its authorial talent, such as in
John Sullivan Dwight’s review of the book published in the same year it was written, in
which he describes Thoreau’s writing as, “admirably clear and terse and elegant; the
pictures wonderfully graphic,” praising him for his position as, “a winner of good cheer and
of free glorious leisure out of what men call the ‘hard realities of life.”1 In this time full of
men praising nature as a source of enlightenment, characteristic of the transcendental
movement, what made Thoreau stand out particularly to critics was his ability to convey
1 Barterian, Evans, Onorato, 280

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the beauty which he found in nature, as an anonymous critic for The Albion wrote of
Walden also in 1854, “The choicest and most popular works on natural history contain no
descriptions more charming than those that abound in this volume.”2 Even those critics
who were concerned with the practicality of the message that Walden contained of solitude
and simplicity, there had to be acknowledgment of the skill in which it was written, as in
this anonymous contributor to The National Era’s review, where the author states, “with all
its extravagances, its sophisms, and its intellectual pride, the book is acute and suggestive,
and contains passages of great beauty.”3 Had it not been for Thoreau’s literary skill, his
work likely would have been lost to the passages of time hidden underneath accusations of
its fantastical expectation of human beings.
This critical attitude of reluctant appreciation is such a direct and sincere reaction to
Walden’s message of self-reliance in nature that it has echoed through the ages of literary
criticism. As late as 1963, Stanley Edgar Heyman reflects the same attitude in his essay,
“Thoreau in Our Time,” when he writes, “At his worst, he is simply a nut reformer, one of
the horde of his period…At his best, Thoreau is the clearest voice for social ethics that ever
spoke out in America.”4 In time, when Walden gained enough popularity that people
became interested in Thoreau’s life for further insight into the inspiration that he found at
Walden Pond, his own biographical strengths and faults entered into the conversation
about what readers of a different time had to gain from his writing. This insight presented
a similar dilemma to many critics, that he lived in a specific circumstance that allowed for
his personal journey to be brought to fruition, yet his work retained a message so
2 Barterian, Evans, Onorato, 280
3 Barterian, Evans, Onorato, 283
4 Thomas, 321

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important to an understanding of the human condition that it could not be written off as
merely a product of his time and nothing more. Joseph Wood Krutch wrote in 1948 in an
article entitled, “Paradise Found,” that, “Something of that happy confidence, that sense of
being right and having found the true path which was to inform Walden, the book, begins
immediately to inform the pages of the deeply contented Journal from which the book was
quarried,”5 limiting Thoreau’s words as “happy confidence,” yet acknowledging its power
in transferring that optimism to the reader.
In later years, societal “progress” made it harder and harder to follow Thoreau’s
example, not only in physicality but in the philosophy of the times, as Loren Eiseley
explained in her essay, “Walden: Thoreau’s Unfinished Business,” “We, with a sharper
knowledge of human limitations and a devotion to the empirical fact, may deny to
ourselves the reality of this other civilization within whose laws and probabilities we
exist.”6 In this, she points out that empiricism tends to lead us to reject the validity of the
natural inspiration that Thoreau seemed to have found in Walden; yet his writing is so
evocative of the scenes and images in which he found himself, and his guidance so direct,
that in reading the book we may find even in our time the possibility of denying our own
circumstances to see what Thoreau saw upon that pond. Judith P. Saunders describes an
aspect of Thoreau’s method which assists the longevity of his writing in her article from
1977 entitled “Economic Metaphor Redefined: The Transcendental Capitalist at Walden,”
where she describes how Thoreau not only manages to take us back to a time when an
independence from society was possible, but how he manages to take us all the way back to
a time when our words were undisturbed by the materialistic tendencies they began to
5 Thomas, 322
6 Bloom, 16

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carry with the development of civilization, saying, “By ironic manipulation of multiple
response, Thoreau expands and restores the potential of our vocabulary; he opens the way
for words to mean more, and therefore to describe our experience in terms other than the
merely commercial and mathematical.”7
Taken out of its context, Walden reveals that Thoreau was not merely a product of
the times and circumstances he lived in, though he was affected by them and his ventures
were in large part made possible by them, but his words carried a far deeper and more
universal understanding of humanity. He managed to construct a work that transcended
the flux of history by relating back to core truths about the human condition which have
not been lost in we materialized and commercialized souls, bathed in the comforts of
modern technology. In a way, it proves to us that beneath it all, we have not lost the core of
our humanity, however thoroughly society continues to mask it.
7 Bloom, 61

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Works Cited
Bloom, Harold. Modern Critical Interpretations: Henry David Thoreau's Walden. New York,
NY: Chelsea House, 1998. Print.
Cramer, Jeffrey S. "Introduction." Introduction. Walden. New Haven: Yale UP, 2004. XV-
XXV. Print.
Dorey, J. M. "Thoreau's Philosophy." Introduction. Walden. New York, NY: Charles E. Merrill,
1910. 14-23. Biodiversity Heritage Library. Web. 3 Apr. 2013.
<http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/title/39703#page/1/mode/1up>.
Miller, Perry. "Walden-The Secret Center." Afterword. Walden. New York, NY: New
American Library, 1999. 297-305. Print.
Thoreau, Henry D., and Owen Thomas. Walden and Civil Disobedience. New York, NY: W.W.
Norton &, 1966. Print.
"Walden; or, Life in the Woods by Henry David Thoreau." Nineteenth-Century Literature
Criticism. Ed. Gerald R. Barterian, Denise Evans, and Mary L. Onorato. Vol. 61.
Detroit: Gale, 1998. 278-390. Literature Criticism Online. Gale. SCELC California
Lutheran University. 5 May 2013
<http://galenet.galegroup.com.ezproxy.callutheran.edu/servlet/LitCrit/callutheran
/FJ3574350007>