The American naturalist, free thinker and writer Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) is known for Walden or life in the woods, the marvelous account of his two-year sojourn as a hermit by the pond in Walden, Massachusetts, published in 1854 and met with immediate success. This single work, at once poetic, philosophical and practical, inspired by the American transcendentalist movement, made its author the champion of an ecology then in limbo. The radiation of Walden will be such that it will still inspire the beat generation and the hippie movement a hundred years later.
