Walden: Volatile Truths

Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1854) is more than a book; it has become an American cultural icon, an archetypal portrait of a person finding peace and truth alone in the woods. Yet the book itself is more complex and rewarding than its image. Composed over a period of nine years, it asks to be read as deliberately as it was written. Its truths are volatile, not to be etched in stone or printed on bumper stickers but to be encountered in the reader's consciousness in a dynamic play of mind.
Volatile Truths, then, tries to respect Thoreau's playful elusiveness and shifting turns of thought. It provides not so much a single interpretation as a series of contexts--historical, structural, linguistic, mythological, and philosophical--from which Walden can be profitably considered but no one of which is definitive. By focusing on close analyses of key passages, Martin Bickman involves the reader in the active making of meaning. Bickman's own writing is clear and accessible, although many of his insights will be new even for scholars in the field. He takes a fresh look at the critical controversies and places Walden in the current revival of interest in American pragmatism.