New Books In Literary Studies

America’s “environmental prophet,” Henry David Thoreau, set out for a simpler, more mindful, and more deeply lived life on Walden Pond on July 4th, 1845. How to live deliberately, being mindful of the things that truly matter and not let ourselves be distracted by what everyone else seems to expect and want from us. The date of July 4th is important, for the book is another Declaration of Independence: an effort to unshackle America from the consumerism, competitiveness, and the profound and shameful dishonesty that created a new nation without reaching true freedom and equality. Thoreau’s Walden is as much about how to live a better, simpler life, as it is about the right way of settling a continent stolen from Native peoples and aided by the moral sin of slavery. Thoreau, after all, gave a word to the idea of “civil disobedience,” refused to pay his taxes to a state that supported slavery (he was jailed for it), and railed against the dishonesty that propped up what today we call white supremacy. Walden is