Henry David Thoreau Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1854. Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature.

Soon after Thoreau graduated from Harvard in 1837, he tuned in to Emerson's voice—and in the mid-1840s became America's most famous "drop out." When he moved to Walden Pond as a protest against conventional society and as the first citizen of what he calls "the only true America," he disappointed the parents who had scraped and saved to send him to college. When he transformed his two years in the woods into Walden, however, he gave American culture one of its most resonant symbolic gestures. The land he built his cabin on belonged to Emerson, though in his own version of the sixties dictum that you can't trust anyone over thirty Thoreau vehemently denied all debts: "I have lived some thirty years on this planet," he wrote in Walden, "and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors. They have told me nothing, and probably cannot tell me anything to the purpose." Shown is a rare "first gathering" of Walden's first signature.

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