Thoreau, Emerson, and Transcendentalism

Thoreau's essay "Walking" grew out of journal entries developed in 1851 into two lectures, "Walking" and "The Wild," which were delivered in 1851 and 1852, and again in 1856 and 1857. Thoreau combined the lectures, separated them in 1854, and worked them together again for publication in 1862, as he was dying. "Walking" was first published just after the author's death, in the June 1862 issue of Atlantic Monthly. (The manuscript that Thoreau prepared for the publisher has been held by the Concord Free Public Library since 1873.) "Walking" was included in the collection Excursions, first issued in Boston by Ticknor and Fields in 1863 and reprinted a number of times from the Ticknor and Fields plates until the publication of the Riverside Edition of Thoreau's writings in 1894. It appeared in the version of Excursions reorganized for and printed as the ninth volume of the Riverside Edition, and in the fifth volume (Excursions and Poems) of the 1906 Walden and Manuscript Editions. It has been printed in a number of selected editions, among them: Essays and Other Writings of Henry Thoreau, edited by Will H. Dircks (London, 1891); Selections from Thoreau, edited by Henry S. Salt (London, 1895); the Modern Library Edition of Walden and Other Writings of Henry David Thoreau, edited by Brooks Atkinson (first published in New York in 1937); The Portable Thoreau, edited by Carl Bode (New York, 1957); Thoreau: The Major Essays, edited by Jeffrey L. Duncan (New York, 1972); and The Natural History Essays, edited by Robert Sattelmeyer (Salt Lake City, 1980). "Walking" has also been printed separately, both in its entirety and in excerpted form.