Search Results: Transcendentalism from Monongahela Books

Trade paperback, NF condition. ~~~ Introduction, essays, annotations, bibliography, index, 390 pages. ~~~ With The Essays of Henry D. Thoreau, Lewis Hyde gathers thirteen of Thoreau's finest short prose works and, for the first time in 150 years, presents them fully annotated and arranged in the order of their composition. This definitive edition includes Thoreau's most famous essays, "Civil Disobedience" and "Walking," along with lesser-known masterpieces such as "Wild Apples," "The Last Days of John Brown," and an account of his 1846 journey into the Maine wilderness to climb Mount Katahdin, an essay that ends on a unique note of sublimity and terror in the face of raw nature. ~~ Hyde diverges from the long-standing and dubious editorial custom of separating Thoreau's politics from his interest in nature, a division that has always obscured the ways in which the two are constantly entwined. "Natural History of Massachusetts" begins not with fish and birds but with a dismissal of the political world,… Read More

NEW copy. Hardcover with laminated, illustrated covers (issued without dust jacket. Illustrated, notes, index, 129 pages. OUT OF PRINT. ---
Allusions to the sea permeate Thoreau's writings, enriching many of his basic ideas. Harp on the Shore examines Thoreau's use of maritime metaphor. It shows how he, a writer ordinarily perceived as quintessentially landlocked, came to view the terrestrial world in terms of the oceanic.
The book explores both the poetic and the philosophical implications of Thoreau's passion for the sea. Beginning with Thoreau's deep attachment to the sea and maritime life in New England and the ways in which that attachment stimulated his imaginative identification of Concord as a center of maritime activity, it examines the sea voyage as a symbol of man's intellectual processes. The book shows how maritime allusions enlarge the significance of Thoreau's ideas about man's struggle to attain individuality and identity, his notion of Homeric or Edenic man, and his belief in a middle… Read More

VG. Remainder mark on bottom edge of book, otherwise a clean, tight copy. ~~~ Illustrations, Chronology, Principal sources, Notes, Index, 455 pages. ~~~ The two years Thoreau spent at Walden Pond and the night he spent in the Concord jail are among the most familiar features of the American intellectual landscape. In this new biography, based on a reexamination of Thoreau's manuscripts and on a retracing of his trips, Robert Richardson offers a view of Thoreau's life and achievement in their full nineteenth century context.

NF/NF. Hardcover with dust jacket in 'as new' condition. ~~~ Detailed notes following each letter, index, 374 pages. ~~~ The first letters in Volume I are those of a seven-year-old child; the last were written by an uncommonly well-educated woman ready for a larger challenge than schoolteaching could offer her. The letters tell the story of her work with Amos Bronson Alcott and his experimental Temple School, of the early days of her friendship with Ralph Waldo Emerson, of the beginnings of her life as a writer, and of her important work as translator and critic of Goethe.

NF/NF. Hardcover with dust jacket in 'as new' condition ~~~ Illustrated end pages (map), introduction, related passages, a Thoreau chronology, glossary of botanical terms, a note on the provenance of the manuscript, manuscript facsimile, 90-odd pages of notes, works cited, index, 409 pages. ~~~ Thoreau's Walden (1854) is regarded both as a masterpiece of American prose and as a forerunner of modern environmentalism. Its author spent much of the 1850s learning what botany could teach him about the New England woods he chronicled. Thoreau brought that knowledge to bear on this sometimes very beautiful essay about plants, fruits and nuts, left incomplete at his death in 1862 and here printed for the first time. Thoreau's brief preface echoes the passions of Walden: "What are all the oranges imported into England to the hips and haws in her hedges?" The rest of the work is arranged fruit by fruit: we begin with elm-fruit ("most mistake the fruit before it falls for leaves, and we owe to it the first… Read More