The Adventures of Henry Thoreau: A Young Man's Unlikely Path to Walden Pond

Henry David Thoreau is an American intellectual icon; what made him so was the decade between his graduation from Harvard and the years he spent in a cabin he built himself on Ralph Waldo Emerson's land at Walden Pond—the formative decade that turned him into one of America's most influential writers.

In a detailed and textured narrative, Sims brings Thoreau to life—striding across the page like a radical folksinger rather than the curmudgeonly recluse who occupies our mental image of W…