Thus begins the entry in Henry Thoreau’s Jour­nal for July 5, 1845. Since March of that year, Thoreau had been build­ing a cabin near Walden Pond on land that Ralph Waldo Emer­son had bought the pre­vi­ous year. (RWE paid $8.10/acre for eleven acres of pas­ture and $125.00 for three or four acres of adja­cent woods.) Thoreau had bor­rowed an axe and cut down a few of the white pines from Emerson’s wood­lot to frame his ten-by-fifteen-foot cabin. In May, some friends had come out from Con­cord and helped him raise the struc­ture. He used the boards from a shack he’d pur­chased for roof and siding. “It is dif­fi­cult to begin with­out borrowing,” Thoreau tells us, with absolute accu­racy, in Walden.

We know the rest of the story: for two years and two months, Thoreau lived in his Walden cabin to get back to the root of things:

I went to the woods because I wished to live delib­er­ately, to front only the essen­tial facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, dis­cover that I had not lived.

What few people real­ize, how­ever, is the extent to which Thoreau’s jour­ney out to Walden Pond was tied up with his own for­tunes and fail­ures as a pro­fes­sional writer.

Thoreau had moved to New York in 1843—Staten Island—with the hopes of making it as a writer. As my friend Bob Richard­son tells it in his superb Thoreau biography:

What Thoreau wanted to do was to estab­lish his “literary labor” on a paying basis in New York…. As soon as he was well, he began making fre­quent trips to the city, going the round of the pub­lish­ers in an effort to place his writ­ings. Writ­ing for and help­ing edit The Dial had been good expe­ri­ence, but it had paid noth­ing, and the one piece that had been placed in another Boston peri­od­i­cal also came to noth­ing finan­cially, as the pub­lisher shab­bily went back on his promise to pay Thoreau despite much dun­ning by Emer­son and others. There were more oppor­tu­ni­ties in New York, then a city of over 300,00 people, or more than three times the size of Boston. Thoreau’s vaguely stated plan was “to earn a cer­tain sum before winter.”…He tried The New Mirror, Brother Jonathan, and The New World; all were “overwhelmed with con­tri­bu­tions which cost noth­ing, and are worth no more,” he reported to Emerson.” The Knicker­bocker is too poor, and only The Ladies’ Com­pan­ion pays.” He con­cluded, glumly, that “even the little that I write is more than will sell.”

Thoreau didn’t make much money, but he did make friends in New York. He met Giles Waldo, William Tappan, W.H. Chan­ning (nephew of William Ellery), Horace Gree­ley, and Henry James, Sr. All of them were older than Thoreau and all of them, as Richard­son says, “were suc­cess­ful: James had family money, the others were pub­lish­ing to gen­eral acclaim.” During his eight months in the city, Thoreau wrote let­ters to his family and the Emer­sons, and he worked on trans­la­tions from the Greek. He decided, in April of 1843, that “it is harder to write great prose than to write verse.” The only thing he man­aged to pub­lish while living in New York was (what else?) a book review, of J.A. Etzler’s utopian The Par­adise within the Reach of all Men, with­out Labor, by Powers of Nature and Machin­ery. (Thoreau described it as “Trancendentalism in mechanics.”)

In 1844, Thoreau moved back to Con­cord to live with his family. Instead of writ­ing, “he was instead spend­ing a good deal of time work­ing with his father making pencils.” In April of that year The Dial died, depriv­ing Thoreau of his one reli­able outlet for pub­li­ca­tion. Richard­son says that Thoreau was “almost alone” among his Tran­scen­den­tal­ist coterie in not having pub­lished a book by this time. (In fact, one of first things he did during his stay at Walden was to revise his draft of A Week on the Con­cord and Mer­ri­mack Rivers, the first draft of which he’d writ­ten in 1842.)

Here’s how Richard­son describes the Thoreau who went to the woods in 1845:

He was twenty-​eight this July and he had always lived either at home, at col­lege, or with Emer­sons. With no money and no steady job, he had few prospects of ever being able to afford a place of his own. And coming as late as it did, this get­ting away [to Walden] inevitably appeared to him in an exag­ger­ated light, the small sense of per­sonal free­dom became an eman­ci­pa­tion of the spirit as he groped for a sub­jec­tive cor­rel­a­tive in his own life expe­ri­ences that would help him to under­stand the slav­ery issue.

On July 6, Thoreau wrote in his jour­nal, “I wish to meet the facts of life—the vital facts, which were the phe­nom­ena or actu­al­ity the Gods meant to show us,—face to face, And so I came down here.” But he also wished to write, and write he did: “In twenty-​six months he wrote two com­plete drafts of A Week, a com­plete draft of Walden, a lec­ture on his life at Walden, a lec­ture essay on Car­lyle, and the first third of The Maine Woods that is the ‘Ktaadn’ essay.” By Sep­tem­ber 1849, after “Ktaadn” and A Week had been pub­lished, Thoreau could write con­fi­dently to Harvard’s pres­i­dent, “I have chosen let­ters as my profession.”