From 1837 to 1861 Thoreau kept a Journal that began as a conventional record ofideas grew into a writers notebook and eventually became the principalimaginative... » 

From 1837 to 1861 Thoreau kept a Journal that began as a conventional record ofideas grew into a writers notebook and eventually became the principalimaginative work of his career. The source of much of his published writingthe Journal is also a record of both his interior life and his monumentalstudies of the natural history of his native Concord Massachusetts. Incontrast to earlier editions the Princeton Edition reproduces the Journal inits original and complete form in a reading text that is free of editorialinterpolations but keyed to a comprehensive scholarly apparatus.Despite activities as timeconsuming and varied as urveying for the town ofConcord and helping a fugitive slave escape to Canada Thoreau wrote nearlyeight hundred manuscript pages in his Journal during the eight months coveredby this volume. Confirmed in his vocation as a natural historian he began tocompile the richly detailed records of Concords woods fields and streamsthat would occupy him for the rest of his life and he consciously shaped theJournal to reflect his new aims as a writer. He also began major revisions ofhis Walden that would lead to its publication in 1854. «