Henry David Thoreau 
Cape Cod illustrated 

Cape Cod illustrated Henry David Thoreau – First published in 1908, ‘Cape Cod’ is a collection of articles by Henry David Thoreau based on numerous trips to the Cape in the early 1880s. A fantastic work that walks the reader through the beauty of Cape Cod and the natural wonders that surround it, this volume is not to be missed by lovers of nature writing. Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862) was an American poet, philosopher, essayist, abolitionist, naturalist, development critic, and historian. He was also a leading figure in Transcendentalism, and is best known for his book ‘Walden’, a treatise on simple living in a natural environment. Other notable works by this author include: ‘The Landlord’ (1843), ‘Reform and the Reformers’ (1846-48), and ‘Slavery in Massachusetts’ (1854). Contents include: ‘The Shipwreck’, ‘Stage-coach Views’, ‘The Plains Of Nauset’, ‘The Beach’, ‘The Wellfleet Oysterman’, ‘The Beach Again’, ‘Across the Cape’, ‘The Highland Light’, ‘The Sea and the Desert’, and ‘Provincetown’. Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. We are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author.

About the author

Henry David Thoreau (born David Henry Thoreau) was an American author, naturalist, transcendentalist, tax resister, development critic, philosopher, and abolitionist who is best known for Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay, Civil Disobedience, an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state.

Thoreau’s books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry total over 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions were his writings on natural history and philosophy, where he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern day environmentalism.

In 1817, Henry David Thoreau was born in Massachusetts. He graduated from Harvard University in 1837, taught briefly, then turned to writing and lecturing. Becoming a Transcendentalist and good friend of Emerson, Thoreau lived the life of simplicity he advocated in his writings. His two-year experience in a hut in Walden, on land owned by Emerson, resulted in the classic, Walden: Life in the Woods (1854). During his sojourn there, Thoreau refused to pay a poll tax in protest of slavery and the Mexican war, for which he was jailed overnight. His activist convictions were expressed in the groundbreaking On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (1849). In a diary he noted his disapproval of attempts to convert the Algonquins ‘from their own superstitions to new ones.’ In a journal he noted dryly that it is appropriate for a church to be the ugliest building in a village, ‘because it is the one in which human nature stoops to the lowest and is the most disgraced.’ (Cited by James A. Haught in 2000 Years of Disbelief.) When Parker Pillsbury sought to talk about religion with Thoreau as he was dying from tuberculosis, Thoreau replied: ‘One world at a time.’

Thoreau’s philosophy of nonviolent resistance influenced the political thoughts and actions of such later figures as Leo Tolstoy, Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr. D. 1862.