From 1837 to 1861 Thoreau kept a Journal that began as a conventional
record of ideas, grew into a writer's notebook, and eventually became
the principal imaginative work of his career. The source of much of his
published writing, the Journal is also a record of both his interior
life and his monumental studies of the natural history of his native
Concord, Massachusetts. In contrast to earlier editions, the Princeton
Edition reproduces the Journal in its original and complete form, in a
reading text that is free of editorial interpolations but keyed to a
comprehensive scholarly apparatus. Despite such time-consuming and
varied activities as extensive surveying for the town of Concord and
helping a fugitive slave escape to Canada, Thoreau wrote nearly eight
hundred manuscript pages in his Journal during the eight months covered
by this volume. Confirmed in his vocation as a natural historian, he
began to compile the richly detailed records of Concord's woods, fields,
and streams that would occupy him for the rest of his life, and he
consciously shaped the Journal to reflect his new aims as a writer. He
also began major revisions of his Walden that would lead to its
publication in 1854.