On July 4, 1845, Henry David Thoreau began a two-year experiment living in a solitary, self-built hut on the edge of Walden Pond outside of Concord, Massachusetts. In Walden, Thoreau wrote, "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." Walden is a detailed account of how and why Thoreau lived in relative seclusion, and his conclusions about living deliberately, and human nature. Though Walden was only moderately successful upon its original publication, it became an important work of the transcendentalist movement and is now accepted as one of the most important works of American literature, contributing significantly to Western, and particularly American, psychology

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