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.

Garry Wills reviews Robert D. Richardson’s William James: In the Mael­strom of Amer­i­can Mod­ernism in this week’s New York Review of Books. A pre­view of the review is avail­able here.

Robert D. Richardson’s William James: In the Mael­strom of Amer­i­can Mod­ernism won a 2007 Ban­croft Prize. Also well worth your time are Richardson’s Emer­son: The Mind on Fire and Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind.

Pamela Lu’s “Ambient Park­ing Lot,” which was first pub­lished in Chicago Review 51:4/52:1, appears in this month’s Harper’s mag­a­zine. So does a review of Bob Richardson’s William James biog­ra­phy. You should buy them both.