Editor’s Note

This edition prints the complete text of Walden, first published in Boston by Ticknor and Fields in 1854, followed, as in our Korean edition, by Thoreau’s essay “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience.” The essay first appeared in 1849, in Elizabeth Peabody’s Aesthetic Papers, as “Resistance to Civil Government”; the present title and text are those of the collection A Yankee in Canada (1866), published after Thoreau’s death. Both are set from a public-domain transcription. The subtitle “or, Life in the Woods” was dropped from the second printing of 1862 at Thoreau’s request; we keep it, as the first edition has it.

Thoreau’s eighteen chapters and their titles are kept; his paragraphs are not divided, even in “Economy,” which runs to some twenty-five thousand words. His accounts of building costs and farm income in “Economy” are set as tables. Spelling and punctuation are those of the source. Straight quotation marks have been set as curly ones, double hyphens as dashes, and underscores marking italics as italics; this is typography only. We have made no corrections to the words.

Removed from the source: the transcription’s header and license, its table of contents, and all distributor notices.