"With quotable lines on every page, this is an important and affecting addition to the Thoreau shelf." ― Booklist The writing of Henry David Thoreau is as full of life today as it was when he published Walden one hundred years ago. In seeking to understand nature, Thoreau sought to "lead a fresh, simple life with God." In 1848 a seeker named Harrison Blake, yearning for a spiritual life of his own, asked the then-fledgling writer for guidance. The fifty letters that ensued, collected here for the first time in their own volume by Thoreau specialist Bradley P. Dean, are by turns earnest, oracular, witty, playful, practical― and deeply insightful and inspiring, as one would expect from America's best prose stylist and great moral philosopher. I open this book at random and find daily strength in Thoreau's words that gives me courage. . . .This is a book I keep on my desk as a record of shared faith. --Terry Tempest Williams, author of Leap and The Open Space of Democracy" "I open this book at random and find daily strength in Thoreau's words that gives me courage .... This is a book I keep on my desk as a record of shared faith." Henry David Thoreau spent almost his entire life in the village of Concord, Massachusetts, where he was born in 1817. After graduating from Harvard College in 1837, he developed a deep friendship with the writer and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, the foremost figure in the Transcendentalist movement. Emerson’s emphasis on the cultivation of intuition and experience as keys to personal and social enlightenment profoundly influenced Thoreau. In 1845, Thoreau built a small cabin on a parcel of land Emerson owned near Walden Pond, where he lived for most of two years, seeking a new relationship to nature, society, and his own self. His experiences there are the raw material of his masterpiece, Walden, or Life in the Woods . Although he was first and last a writer and outdoorsman, Thoreau worked as a surveyor and handyman and was an active abolitionist and opponent of war and imperialism. He died in 1862 of tuberculosis. Bradley P. Dean, an independent scholar living in West Peterborough, New Hampshire, has written extensively on Thoreau's life and writings, and has edited two of Thoreau's previously unpublished booklength manuscripts.