Henry David Thoreau
Quality Paperback Book Club
1864 (1994)
423 pages
The Maine Woods is an account of a trip taken in the Summer of 1846 by Henry David Thoreau, the great Transcendentalist philosopher, through Maine to the Mount Katahdin. The book, published after Thoreau’s death (like most of his writing), primarily gives the details of the plant and animal life of the wilderness he crosses by foot or by canoe. The descriptions of these natural features, I would say, make up most of the book and demonstrate a very focused attention on the natural world. This particular edition of the book also includes lengthy appendices that list the life Thoreau encountered.
Aside from noting all of the different forms of plant and animal life, The Maine Woods is filled with Thoreau’s musings on human activities in its interaction with nature, focusing both on American development and treatment of the land, and on the Indian interactions with the land. A particularly noteworthy passage was where Thoreau lamented the killing of a moose by a white hunter, just for fun. Thoreau was very critical of such activity which is, in essence, cowardly, stupid, and wasteful. He was also critical of some Indian (to use Thoreau’s term) practices as well, noting that they could be equally wasteful of natural resources at times, although he certainly also showed a great respect for Indian culture and the final section of the book is a list of words from the languages of the American northeast, and their English translations.
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