American Scientist

American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau. Edited by Bill McKibben. Library of America, 2008.

Although this book focuses less directly on Thoreau than the other titles on our list, it allows readers to see for themselves the seminal role of his environmental writings in American letters. With works by Walt Whitman, John Muir, Frederick Law Olmsted, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Loren Eiseley, Annie Dillard, Leslie Marmon Silko, E. O. Wilson, Alice Walker, Barbara Kingsolver, and Rebecca Solnit, among many others—along with a few pieces by the man himself—the volume is packed with essential reads.

The Boatman: Henry David Thoreau’s River Years. Robert M. Thorson. Harvard University Press, 2017.

Years of meticulous research by geologist Thorson went into the making of this penetrating, revelatory book that delves into Thoreau’s pioneering work in river science.

The Book That Changed America: How Darwin’s Theory of Evolution Ignited a Nation. Randall Fuller. Viking, 2017.

Fuller discusses how Thoreau and three of his friends, as Laura Dassow Walls describes it, “jumped aboard Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1860, far earlier than Darwin scholarship has previously recognized, and with important consequences.”

Henry David Thoreau: A Life. Laura Dassow Walls. Chicago University Press, 2017 (forthcoming, July 12).

Walls focuses her biography on Thoreau as a writer, an approach that allows her to engage nimbly with her subject’s many facets, and Thoreau the naturalist features prominently. Beautifully written, this is a substantial volume in which every page feels essential. You won’t want to put it down.

Henry David Thoreau in Context. Edited by James Finley. Cambridge University Press, 2017.

The latest addition to Cambridge’s Literature in Context series, this title presents short essays discussing Thoreau’s work from an array of perspectives—considering it, for example, in geographic, intellectual, literary, political, scientific, and environmental contexts. The collection includes essays by two of the authors I spoke with about Thoreau's bicentennial: Robert M. Thorson writes on Thoreau and physical science, and Laura Dassow Walls discusses Thoreau and technology.

Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind. Robert D. Richardson Jr. University of California Press, 1986.

A groundbreaking intellectual biography, Henry Thoreau remains indispensable more than 30 years after its publication. Richardson carefully maps out the literature Thoreau read and engaged with, examines it in the context of Thoreau’s own writings, and identifies the Transcendentalist’s major phases of creative and intellectual development. Richardson shows how Thoreau increasingly focused on scientific endeavors in the final stage of his life, a pursuit that allowed him to weave together the strands of his many interests. He also traces Thoreau’s study of Darwinian developmental theory and how he found it accorded with his own research on seeds for “The Succession of Forest Trees.”

Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science. Laura Dassow Walls. University of Wisconsin Press, 1995.

For more than a century, readers and scholars had been accustomed to thinking of Thoreau as a literary figure, a philosopher, and a reformer. This seminal work, in which Walls examines Thoreau as a naturalist, reclaimed his scientific contributions.

“Thoreau.” Ralph Waldo Emerson. Atlantic, August 1862.

Emerson’s eulogy for Thoreau, delivered at his funeral and published by the Atlantic, presents an intimate portrait while also framing out a legacy. Emerson clearly anticipates the breadth of his friend’s influence: Noting that Thoreau “had in a short life exhausted the capabilities of this world,” he concludes, “Wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a home.”

Thoreau and the Language of Trees. Richard Higgins. University of California Press, 2016.

Higgins takes a contemplative approach to Thoreau’s writings about trees, braiding together thoughtful selections from Thoreau’s journals with his own analysis and insights. His photos of trees (such as the one at the top of this page) lend considerable beauty to the project; many also tie directly to species, locations, scenes, and environmental effects that Thoreau discusses.

Thoreau at 200: Essays and Reassessments. Edited by Kristen Case and K. P. Van Anglen. Cambridge University Press, 2016.

The 16 essays in this collection, from a range of accomplished Thoreau scholars, reconsider aspects of his work, examining subjects such as how Thoreau’s philosophies relate to contemporary environmental and economic movements. The book includes a chapter by Laura Dassow Walls discussing Thoreau, science, and poetics.

“Thoreau on Science and System.” Philip Cafaro. Paper presented at the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, Boston, MA, August 10–15, 1998.

Cafaro, an environmental ethicist who has published a book on Thoreau’s ethical philosophies, examines how Thoreau prioritized method over system in science, which he believed could lead to overgeneralization and foster a habit of distancing oneself, ethically, from one’s subject. His methodical approach to data collection and analysis required close attention to the individual, Cafaro asserts, and was rooted in a fervent belief that the existence of the individual is more important than the scientific study of it.

Walden. S. B. Walker. Kehrer Verlag, 2017.

For this handsome book, New England artist Walker has assembled a collection of his black-and-white photographs of Walden Pond and its environs as they appear today. The Emerson family, who owned the parcel of land around Walden Pond, donated it for public recreational use in 1922, and it’s now part of the popular Walden Pond State Reservation. (You can view a sampling of the photographs here.)

Walden Warming: Climate Change Comes to Thoreau’s Woods. Richard B. Primack. Chicago University Press, 2014.

Readers interested in knowing whether the ecological data Thoreau collected remain relevant need look no further than Primack’s discussion of how his lab used them as a baseline for data they were collecting in the same area. The results reveal much about climate change and its effects on an ecosystem. (For more, you can also check out this article Primack cowrote with Amanda S. Gallinat for American Scientist.)

Walden’s Shore: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Science. Robert M. Thorson. Harvard University Press, 2015.

Thorson’s fresh approach to Walden looks beyond the work as literary artifact and philosophical treatise, showing it from the perspective of a geologic scientist. What emerges is a fascinating study of Thoreau’s close attention to geology and an exploration of his interest in theories of geological evolution.