Excursions

Excursions contains the complete texts of nine of Thoreau's most popular essays. These include Natural History of Massachusetts, his first essay to appear in The Dial (a quarterly periodical edited by Margaret Fuller), as well as other well known early works like A Winter Walk and The Landlord. Later works include his famous essays Walking, Autumnal Tints and Wild Apples, the last of which was based on a lecture he gave during the Concord Lyceum's 1859-1860 season and was published in the Atlantic Monthly after his death.Henry David Thoreau was an American author, poet, philosopher, polymath, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist. He is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay Resistance to Civil Government (also known as Civil Disobedience), an argument for disobedience to an unjust state. Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry total over 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions are his writings on natural history and philosophy, where he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern-day environmentalism. His literary style interweaves close natural observation, personal experience, pointed rhetoric, symbolic meanings, and historical lore, while displaying a poetic sensibility, philosophical austerity, and "Yankee" love of practical detail. He was also deeply interested in the idea of survival in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay; at the same time he advocated abandoning waste and illusion in order to discover life's true essential needs.