Walden Pond

The famous writer Henry David Thoreau spent two years in a cabin at Lake Walden to write one of the most famous works in the American genre of nature description. A book has the same name as the lake: Walden. During Thoreau's life, his writings were known only to a small group of people. Today, however, he is a big name from the 19th-century American literature. In his masterpiece, Walden, or Life in the Woods, published in 1854, he described how one can live a simple life in the forest, apart from the "civilized" society. The theme of Civil Disobedience is the legitimate resistance of an individual against an unjust government. This book was an inspiration to later forms of nonviolent resistance. Thoreau was fundamentally opposed to slavery, gave lectures and acted against the laws for escaped slaves and prisoners, and praised the work of abolitionists - in particular that of John Brown. Thoreaus philosophy of nonviolent resistance would later influence political, spiritual and literary figures like Lev Tolstoy, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Many of his ideas were formed from reading the masterpiece Kosmos of scientist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt.

Dromos