While Thoreau lived at Walden (July 4, 1845–September 6, 1847), he wrote journal entries and prepared lyceum lectures on his experiment in living at the pond. By 1847, he had begun to set his first draft of Walden down on paper. After leaving Walden, he expanded and reworked his material repeatedly until the spring of 1854, producing a total of eight versions of the book. James Munroe, publisher of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), originally intended to publish Walden as well. However, with the failure of A Week, Munroe backed out of the agreement. In 1852, two parts of what would be Walden were published in Sartain's Union Magazine ("The Iron Horse" in July, "A Poet Buys A Farm" in August). Six selections from the book (under the title "A Massachusetts Hermit") appeared in advance of publication in the March 29, 1854 issue of the New York Daily Tribune. Ticknor and Fields published Walden; or, Life in the Woods in Boston in an edition of 2,000 copies on August 9, 1854. A second printing was issued in 1862, with multiple printings from the same stereotyped plates issued between that time and 1890. A second American edition (from a new setting of type) was published in 1889 by Houghton, Mifflin, in two volumes, the first English edition in 1886. In 1894, Walden was included as the second volume of the Riverside Edition of Thoreau's collected writings, in 1906 as the second volume of the Walden and Manuscript Editions. In 1971, it was issued as the first volume of the Princeton Edition.
Since the nineteenth century, Walden has been reprinted many times, in a variety of formats. It has been issued in its entirety and in abridged or selected form, by itself and in combination with other writings by Thoreau, in English and in many European and some Asian languages, in popular and scholarly versions, in inexpensive printings, and in limited fine press editions. A number of editions have been illustrated with artwork or photographs. Some individual chapters have been published separately.
Some of the well-known twentieth century editions of or including Walden are: the 1937 Modern Library Edition, edited by Brooks Atkinson; the 1939 Penguin Books edition; the 1946 edition with photographs, introduction, and commentary by Edwin Way Teale; the 1946 edition of selections, with photographs, by Henry Bugbee Kane; the 1947 Portable Thoreau, edited by Carl Bode; the 1962 Variorum Walden, edited by Walter Harding; and the 1970 Annotated Walden (a facsimile reprint of the first edition, with illustrations and notes), edited by Philip Van Doren Stern.
