A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

Henry David Thoreau
Maxham daguerreotype - 1856
Core works and topics Civil Disobedience Herald of Freedom The Last Days of John Brown Life Without Principle Paradise (to be) Regained A Plea for Captain John Brown Reform and the Reformers Remarks After the Hanging of John Brown The Service Sir Walter Raleigh Slavery in Massachusetts Thomas Carlyle and His Works Walden A Walk to Wachusett A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers Wendell Phillips Before the Concord Lyceum The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau Thoreau Society
Related topics Abolitionism · Anarchism Anarchism in the United States Civil disobedience Concord, Massachusetts Conscientious objection Direct action · Ecology Environmentalism History of tax resistance Individualist anarchism John Brown · Lyceum movement Nonviolent resistance Ralph Waldo Emerson Simple living · Tax resistance Tax resisters · Transcendentalism The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail Walden Pond

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers is a book by Henry David Thoreau, first published in 1849. The book is ostensibly the narrative of a boat trip from Concord, Massachusetts to Concord, New Hampshire and back Thoreau had taken with his brother John in 1839. As John had died from tetanus in 1842, Thoreau wrote the book as a tribute to his memory.^[1]

Background

The book's first draft was completed while Thoreau was living at Walden Pond. Upon completing the book, Thoreau was unable to find a publisher willing to publish it, and so had it published at his own expense.^[1] Few copies of the book sold, and Thoreau was left with several hundred extra copies, and put into debt. A slightly revised version of the book, based on corrections Thoreau had made himself, was published in 1868, six years after his death.

While the book may appear to be a travel journal, broken up into chapters for each day, the book is rarely about that topic, as the actual trip took two weeks. While given passages are a literal description of the journey from Concord, Massachusetts, down the Concord River to the Middlesex Canal, to the Merrimack River, up to Concord, New Hampshire, and back, much of the text is in the form of digressions by the Harvard-educated author on diverse topics such as religion, poetry, and history. Thoreau relates these topics back to his own life experiences, often framed by the rapid changes taking place in his native New England during the Industrial Revolution, often changes that Thoreau laments.

References

^ ^a ^b "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers". Princeton University Press. http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7720.html. Retrieved 3 February 2011.

External links

Downloadable full text - Project Gutenberg