Hero to environmentalists and ecologists, and a profound thinker on humanity's happiness, Henry David Thoreau was one of the strongest shapers of the American character in the 19th century. This 1849 book, written while Thoreau was living at Walden Pond, is ostensibly a travel book, written to commemorate an 1839 river journey he took with his brother, John, from Massachusetts to New Hampshire. But the trip is only the framework upon which Thoreau hangs some of his most provocative thoughts on poetry, history, religion, dreams, and the passing of a slower way of life with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the evidence of which he witnessed from the rivers. While not Thoreau's best-known work, *A Week* may be his most important, a beautifully determined attempt to understand the past and reconcile it with the future that continues to move readers today. Writer and philosopher HENRY DAVID THOREAU (1817-1862) was born in Concord, Massachusetts, and educated at Harvard University. His writings on human nature, materialism, and the natural world rank him among the most influential thinkers of American literature.