Walden and Civil Disobedience Author:Henry David Thoreau ?I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.? That quintessential American?Henry David Thoreau continues to inspire us to improve our neighbors by bettering ourselves, to seek tr... more »uth above all things, and to accept nothing handed down by a government, or any system, before questioning it first.
Jonathan Levin is Associate Professor of English and American Studies at Fordham University, where he teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature
and culture. He is the author of The Poetics of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism,