ABSTRACT
The immediate beginning of Walden was in 1846 when Henry David Thoreau learned that the audience at one of his Lyceum lectures—probably the one on Carlyle on February 4, 1846—had expected to hear about his life in the woods. In the back of one of his journals of 1845–47 he wrote out a preliminary list of topics for the later part of the first version, and then he numbered the topics in the order in which he first intended to use them in Walden. A torn leaf in the Walden manuscript gives a glimpse of how he roughed out such a piece as the story of investigating, wrecking, and removing James Collins’ shanty. Thoreau’s quarrel with the ways of his contemporaries and the general outline as well as a large part of his story are in the first version, but it is by no means a “scale model” of Walden in either content or form.
