Literary Critics at Walden Pond

Henry D. Thoreau's Walden: or, Life in the Woods (published 1854) fared well with the critics. Walden is an account of how Mr. Thoreau built a cabin in a woods he did not own and lived in it simply and inexpensively for two and a half years, but it offers a sharp critique of the assumptions and conventions of American society. Putnam's Monthly Magazine observed,

"There is much excellent good sense delivered in a very comprehensive and by no means unpleasant style in Mr. Thoreau's book, let people think as they may of the wisdom or propriety of living after his fashion, denying oneself all the luxuries which the whole earth can afford, for the sake of leading a life of lawless vagabondage, and freedom from starched collars, there are but few readers who will fail to find profit and refreshment in his pages."

The Knickerbocker said that since the days when the dictator Sulla "so coolly massacred so many Roman citizens, there has not been a man who apparently has contemplated his fellow-men with a more cheerful, lofty, and philosophical scorn" than Mr. Thoreau. The Knickerbocker declared that Walden and the Auto-Biography of Barnum were the two most important books published in 1854, and it found resemblances between the authors:

"Both are good-natured, genial, pleasant men, One sneers at and ridicules the pursuits of his contemporaries with the same cheerfulness and good-will that the other cajoles and fleeces them. The rural philosopher measured the length, breadth, and depth of Walden Pond, with the same jovial contentment that the metropolitan show-man measured the length, breadth and depth of the public gullibility. ... And finally, both were humbugs – one a town and the other a rural humbug."

The Knickbocker concluded,

"Extravagant as [Walden] is in the notions it promulgates, we think it is nevertheless calculated to do a good deal of good, and we hope it will be widely read. Where it exerts a bad influence upon one person, Barnum's auto-biography will upon a hundred."

Graham's American Monthly Magazine said of Walden,

"Whatever may be thought or said of this curious volume, nobody can deny its claim to individuality of opinion, sentiment, and expression. Sometimes strikingly original, sometimes merely eccentric and odd. it is always racy and stimulating. ... Mr. Thoreau, it is well known, belongs to that class of transcendentalists who lay the greatest stress on the 'I,' and knows no limitation on the exercise of the rights of that important pronoun. The customs, manners, occupations, religions, of society, he 'goes out' from, and brings them before his own inward tribunal for judgment. He differs from all mankind with wonderful composure; and, without any of the fuss of the come-outers, goes beyond them in asserting the autocracy of the individual."

The Western Literacy Messenger said,

"We have had a huge deal of pleasure from the pages of Walden. There is music in the book. It is Yankee Doodle with new words and a variety of accompaniments. It is the hummings in prose of Genius in a Cottage of his own hands' making, as he looks out on Walden Pond, and into the woods and into his own heart and into the heart of the New England cent-fisher."