Known to most readers as the author of Walden: Or Life in The Woods, Henry David Thoreau is also one of America's most important and influential essayists, a fact that is often obscured by the power and popularity of his masterpiece. During the period from 1843 to 1862, Thoreau often published his essays in important periodicals before they appeared in collections or before they were collected by his editors for posthumous publication. The Maine Woods, for example, began as a collection of narrative essays published partly in popular periodicals. Thoreau's essays and their ideas were often tested in nineteenthcentury literary and political journals. Many of his essays began as journal entries written in his fourteen volume journal, and many of these entries were later expanded into lectures that were read on the lyceum circuit, at times in heated political and rhetorical situations. These lectures were often revised as essays or transformed into much longer works like Walden, a book that strikes many scholars as a collection of related essays. For example, several chapters of Walden, such as "Economy" or "Spring," are often anthologized as distinct literary essays. Scholarly attempts to comprehend the unity of Walden often fail because individual chapters often operate as essays on single topics or groups of related topics. Why can "Economy," for example, be read as a sharp critique of the nineteenth-century cult of progress? Why can "Spring," moreover, be easily read as a euphoric tribute to the power of seasonal change and the myth of renewal? These essay-like chapters often followed the journal to lecture to essay pattern of development.

Thoreau's reputation as a skilled writer of nonfiction prose in the essay form places him among the most influential essayists in the American literary tradition. His contributions equal or surpass those of Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, H. L. Mencken, E. B. White, Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, and others. His essays explore many of the same issues as those of Emerson, but his style and approach are profoundly different. Some of his essays respond to real historical events; some question the ethics and values of American life, and some are gentle and entertaining excursions, while others address serious issues of natural history in which Thoreau demonstrates his understanding of botany, biology, and the foundations of ecology. The sheer range of his work is impressive; his essays range across forms and topics, moods and tones, and rhetorical purposes. Thoreau, often with a clear sense of audience, may attempt to persuade, to educate, to amuse, and to entertain. He is a virtuoso writing across the range of essay forms and exhibiting impressive variety within the essay genre.

Thoreau's essays frequently address major issues of his day and ours, and he often speaks to current generations more powerfully than he did to his own. He used the essay format to critique the power of government, to condemn slavery, to honor the martyr John Brown, to examine the ways that his peers earned their livings, and to analyze the nature of reformers. His essays on political and ethical topics seem timeless, while they are also historically important. "Civil Disobedience" is the classic American statement on civil disobedience and passive resistence that has influenced generations of Americans as well as Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi in their struggles against oppression. Thoreau, who was fascinated with political and economic issues that were related to his strong belief in selfreliance and individualism, used his essays to critique government and community suppression of individual liberty. He also used his political and ethical essays to persuade his readers and listeners to embrace important moral and ethical positions such as opposition to slavery and resistence to irresponsible government behavior.

Thoreau also wrote narrative essays that followed the journey or excursion pattern. Journey essays, for example, were collected to become the Maine Woods, Cape Cod and A Yankee in Canada. The prototype of these longer works, however, appeared in informal essays like "A Winter Walk" or "Walking." These pieces are informal, casual, and suggestive. In each piece, the act of walking suggests larger meanings, issues and themes; for each composition, therefore, the outward journey becomes, at least in part, the inward journey. Both follow a formal movement related to the walking theme, and both are also exploratory and often richly symbolic. The act of walking inspires the senses, suggesting topics to the narrators for mini-sermons, analysis, and discussions. Here Thoreau develops a close relationship with his readers as he attempts to persuade them to share his journey and his discoveries. Implicit in the formal structures of these compositions is the idea that readers will share the journey and open themselves to new insights. Thoreau's excursions are designed to help stimulate new thoughts in his readers' minds.

Thoreau also wrote natural history essays. As a naturalist and close observer of nature, he was easily attracted to natural history writing. Thoreau filled his journals with observations about the plants, flowers, insects, animals, geography, and the seasonal changes in New England. He valued keen observation, precise measurement, and careful classification. He worked parttime as a surveyor of property and wood-lots in and around Concord, and even Walden, particularly the ponds chapters, contains several examples of his interest in measurement and quantification. The essay form provided an appropriate outlet for these interests. He wrote such essays as "The Natural History of Massachusetts," a work of empirical exposition, and "Autumnal Tints," a combination of botanical knowledge, observation, and poetic vision, in the natural history mode. He wrote as scientist and humanist in these essays, which are often precise, visual, sensual, and richly metaphorical.

At times, Thoreau seems to embody the principles of poetic sensibility that Emerson elucidates in "The Poet." In his prose, he is often poetic, able to synthesize the disparate, fragmented parts of experience or to unify the fragmented landscape. He seems to develop "meter-making arguments" in poetic prose, to be Emerson's "seer" and "language maker" who shows us reality amidst appearances ( "The Poet"9, 21, 36). At other times, he seems like the embodiment of Emerson's American scholar as expressed in the essay of the same name. He is Emerson's "man thinking," who thinks honestly and openly about important themes ( "The American Scholar"84). Despite his wide reading and learning, Thoreau does not make his essays overly allusive. Instead, he uses the tropes of everyday experience; he makes natural facts suggest higher meanings. He helps the stones, forests, and mountains to speak to us. Instead of theorizing about the qualities of a poet, Thoreau, in his essays, exemplifies Emerson's concept of the poet.

Thoreau the essayist is also Thoreau the master rhetorician who uses effective rhetorical techniques to achieve his effects and develop his arguments. It is reasonable to view Thoreau' s prose as governed by rhetorical strategies common in his time but used uniquely for his own ends and situations. I will present an overview of the strategies and techniques that mark his style and approach to help clarify his rhetorical practice. Throughout the essays, Thoreau is a master symbolist who uses the natural world for symbols and tropes, and who takes his symbols from the forests, lakes, trails, and basic features of common life. We can read his essays as collections of natural symbols that suggest, define, and encompass complex situations. In addition to his rich and skillful use of metaphors drawn from the natural world, Thoreau effectively uses synecdoches, a figure in which the part is used for the whole or the whole is used for the part. This is also the rhetorical figure behind Thoreau's microcosms in which the small and the typical represent the general or the universal; Walden Pond, for example, represents all the principles of nature.

Thoreau is a master of precise, imagistic description, frequently using concrete, specific and sensual language to support his propositions or expand his ideas. He seldom leaves us at an abstract conceptual level but instead clarifies and amplifies his abstractions in ways that allow readers to see, feel, understand, and, at times, to hear the material. These sensual descriptions are remarkable for their clarity, their visual metaphors, and for the meticulously developed structural patterns that often function in poetic and meditative fashions. Thoreau often brings his readers closer to a subject by providing collections of images that invite his audience to meditate on the subject at hand.

Thoreau frequently uses other techniques in his more persuasive and argumentative essays such as those on politics and ethical themes. Often reasoning syllogistically, he will move the reader from proposition to proposition, sometimes without supporting evidence for his premises. His well-formed propositions stand out in memorable ways, often appearing as aphorisms and other forms of sententia common to his style. At times, such propositions will be the lead sentences for whole paragraphs; at other times, they will belong to strings of related propositions that are stacked together for rhetorical power.

Thoreau is the master of the sentence, perhaps his most effective unit of discourse. His development of other units of discourse pales in comparison to his skill with these polished and often much revised sentences. I speak here of the sentence in an earlier sense as a capsule of wisdom, a unit of discourse that is usually compact, suggestive, and sententious. He mastered at least three forms of sententious sentences and the anti-Ciceronian period, known today as the cumulative sentence.

Thoreau frequently used three types of suggestive and compact sentences--paradox, aphorism, and proverb. He frequently used paradoxical statements to shock and disrupt conventional thinking and to urge his readers to see a different perspective on his subjects. These paradoxes are of two types--the self-contradictory statement that upon closer examination contains unexpected forms of truth and the compact statement that contradicts conventional or received opinion. The second type has a kind of jarring effect and often appears as unexpected and initially disconcerting. Ultimately both types of paradoxes help readers restructure their thinking about Thoreau's topics in new or different ways. They help readers develop new angles of vision. Sometimes his paradoxes are stated aphoristically, but his aphorisms are often not paradoxes but short, compact, and suggestive sentences instead that have at least the aura of wisdom. Such sententious sentences are easily remembered, highly polished, emphatic, and declarative, suggesting more than they say. The third type is the proverb in which Thoreau states his points in the style of folk or traditional wisdom, presented in laconic, and colloquial sentences. Proverb style sentences appear occasionally in the essays but more frequently in Walden. Finally, Thoreau masterfully uses the cumulative sentence or the antiCiceronian period, often presenting readers with short declarative sentences followed by long strings of descriptive modifiers that are frequently visual and concrete. What happens in these sentences is this: the main statement which is often general and abstract is clarified and amplified by additions that follow the initial statement called the kernal sentence. Thus statements are embellished, amplified, and copiously developed in ways that draw readers into Thoreau's versions of the natural world or into his arguments.

Thoreau's essays also possess a pronounced oral quality. That is they have qualities common to lectures or sermons. An example of this oral feel is an often obvious appeal to specific audiences, particularly in those essays concerned with political, economic, and ethical questions and those designed to be persuasive. Several essays in this collection have this feel of oral address to a specific group or to people who share specific values typical of the Concord, Massachusetts area around 1850. Remembering that Thoreau often delivered these essays as lectures to identifiable audiences helps explain the genesis of this audience awareness. Concord residents who attended his lectures were often conservative, rural people, who admired tradition, the work ethic, frugality, and conformity. Certainly people who shared Thoreau's views attended his lectures, but his essays are loaded with arguments and images aimed at those who would disagree. I am not saying that he changed his viewpoints to pander to his audiences but rather that he simply used strategies that would make some of his controversial ideas more persuasive to listeners and readers. At times, he uses elements of the sermon form to make his points, presenting parables, exempla, and quotations from diverse scriptural traditions. Most importantly, he attempted to tell the truth as he saw it, thus allowing readers to accept or reject his arguments.

Thoreau did not always organize his essays consistently. They often seem to follow an organic form in which each essay's arrangement follows and evolves from the content instead of the content simply following the form. Thoreau does not appear to develop a pattern of organization and then fill it with ideas. Form in a specific sense does not precede content. Substance generates form, and his pattern of organization appears artless and genuine. Many of the essays are rather loosely organized by contemporary standards of expository prose. The walking essays follow the progression of the walk or brief journey; "The Succession of Forest Trees" follows the progress of biological development of the new forest, and "Autumnal Tints" follows the pattern by which deciduous trees change color in the fall. Moreover, Thoreau has a strong sense of the expectations that he creates in his readers' minds, and he often strives to meet these expectations. His form seems organic and nearly spontaneous. It seems to evolve in a way that is analogous to the growth of a tree or leaf or even to that of the melting sandbank in the "Spring" chapter of Walden (304-308).

I have chosen the most significant of Thoreau's individual essays for this collection, grouping them according to the three types discussed earlier: reform essays on political and ethical behavior, informal essays on walking, and the natural history essays. I have tried to represent the range of his achievements with the essay genre, presenting a variety of forms, styles, subjects, and interests, and I have selected essays that help illustrate his progressive development as a writer, with the earliest published in 1843, at the start of his writing career, and the latest published in 1863, nearly a year after his death. In this collection will appear essays like "Civil Disobedience" that possess great historical significance, essays that have influenced later writers and thinkers, informal essays like "Walking" that are classics in their genre, and essays illustrating Thoreau's strong scientific bent and interests. The essays in this volume often appear individually in anthologies, and are seldom found grouped together. I have also deliberately omitted works originally published as essays that later became sections or chapters of book length published works. "Ktaadn" and "Chesuncook," both of which were published separately as essays, were later collected and published as part of The Maine Woods," and sections of Cape Cod, like "The Shipwreck," appeared originally as short prose. These essays are know as parts of these larger works and are best understood in the full context of these volumes. I have also avoided pieces that were so heavily edited after his death that they carry the editor's imprint and voice. In these pieces, Thoreau's original intentions easily become lost or obscured.