The Maine Woods
is a characteristically Thoreauvian book: a personal account of exploration, of exterior and interior discovery in a natural setting, conveyed in taut, workmanlike prose. Thoreau's evocative renderings of the life of the primitive forest—its mountains, waterways, fauna, flora, and inhabitants—are valuable in themselves. But his impassioned protest against despoilment in the name of commerce and sport, which even by the 1850s threatened to deprive Americans of the "tonic of wildness," makes
an especially vital book for our time. This edition presents Thoreau's fullest account of the wilderness as he intended it.