The Maine Woods - Softcover

Thoreau, Henry David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060914041 ISBN 13: 9780060914042

Publisher: HarperCollins, 1988

Synopsis

Thoreau's narratives of his journeys into the Maine wilderness are presented

About this title

Book Description:

Posthumously published in 1864, The Maine Woods depicts Henry David Thoreau’s experiences in the forests of Maine, and expands on the author’s transcendental theories on the relation of humanity to Nature. On Mount Katahdin, he faces a primal, untamed Nature. Katahdin is a place “not even scarred by man, but it was a specimen of what God saw fit to make this world.” In Maine he comes in contact with “rocks, trees, wind and solid earth” as though he were witness to the creation itself. Of equal importance, The Maine Woods depicts Thoreau’s contact with the American Indians and depicts his tribal education of learning the language, customs, and mores of the Penobscot people. Thoreau attempts to learn and speak the Abenaki language and becomes fascinated with its direct translation of natural phenomena as in the word sebamook—a river estuary that never loses is water despite having an outlet because it also has an inlet. The Maine Woods illustrates the author’s deeper understanding of the complexities of the primal wilderness of uplifted rocky summits in Maine and provides the reader with the pungent aroma of balsam firs, black spruce, mosses, and ferns as only Thoreau could. This new, redesigned edition features an insightful foreword by Thoreau scholar Richard Francis Fleck.

From the Back Cover:

The Maine Woods is a characteristically Thoreauvian book: a personal account of exploration, of exterior and interior discovery in a natural setting, conveyed on taut, workmanlike prose.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 1988
• ISBN 10: 0060914041
• ISBN 13: 9780060914042
• Binding: Paperback