This first volume of the Journal covers the early years of Thoreau's rapid intellectual and artistic growth. The Journal reflects his reading, travels, and contacts with Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and other Transcendentalists. With characteristic reticence, Thoreau mentions only a few episodes in his emotional history: an ill-fated romance, the death of his elder brother, and an unhappy sojourn on Staten Island, where he tried to write for New York periodicals. Parts of Thoreau's Journal have been published, but always with large omissions of text and with considerable grooming of its erratic manuscript style. This edition presents the entire surviving manuscript in a text preserving Thoreau's words as he originally wrote them.
