A Thoreau Checklist
(based largely on Michael Meyer in Myerson, The Transcendentalists)

Individual Works
Cape Cod
Civil Disobedience (Resistance to Civil Government)
Life Without Principle
Maine Woods, The
Paradise (to be) Regained [Etzler]
Plea for Captain John Brown, A
Slavery in Massachusetts
Week on the Concord and Merrimack, A
Walden
--J. Lyndon Shanley, The Making of Walden
--Walter Harding, The Variorum Walden
--Philip Van Doren Stern, The Annotated Walden
--The Illustrated Walden
Walking

Bibliography
Walter Harding, A Thoreau Handbook
Walter Harding and Michael Meyer, The Mew Thoreau Handbook

Editions
Writings, 20v (1906), aka Manuscript ed., Walden ed.
Writings (1971--), Princeton, about 25 volumes

Biography
Man of Concord, ed. Harding
Walter Harding, The Days of Henry Thoreau (repr. Dover)

Criticism
Lewis Leary in Eight American Authors, ed. James Woodress
Michael Meyer in The Transcendentalists, ed. Joel Myerson

Reading and sources
19th century linguistics and scriptural studies
Relations to Emerson, William Ellery Channing, Bronson Alcott, Orestes Brownson, Walt Whitman, Margaret Fuller
North American pre-history, early history, Native American culture, folklore, Canadian culture
Use of Biblical, Protestant and New England Puritan traditions, jeremiad
Use of Greek and Latin classics, especially Homer and Ovid
Hindu, Buddhist, and Oriental culture
Political and social ideas (Etzler, Say); technology (railroad, telegraph, printing); ethnicity (American Indians, Irish, Canadians); revolution (Fourier, Marx, 1848); "higher law" (Creon in Antigone); utopianism and anarchism; slavery and abolition (John Brown); temperance; sexual abstinence; educational reform
Nature (integration & separation), naturalist, natural history, conservation, ecology
Religious sects, Puritans, Quakers, Deists, Unitarians, Transcendentalists, mysticism (Christian and Eastern)
Aesthetics and style (organicism, formlessness, verbal puns, folklore, proverbs, paradoxes, revisions, cycles and circles, imagery and myth, ironic pessimism)
Composition, revision, use of journals Influence (Willa Cather, Anton Chekhov, Emily Dickinson, John Dos Passos, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Mahatma Gandhi, Hawthorne, Hemingway, Dr Martin Luther King Jr, Normal Mailer, Robert Pirsig, Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Butler Yeats)
Posthumous editorial compilations and memoirs
Public reputation and influence, adaptations, appropriations, quotations

Twenty Questions and/or suggestions for study:
1. What use does Thoreau make of Emerson's idea and methods?
2. To what extent are Thoreau's senses of consciousness, writing, editing, text, and publication different from Emerson's
3. Historical (external) motifs in Walden: the railroad, the Irish, the telegraph, the revolutions of 1848, local and national politics
4. Anthropomorphic images of animals and nature in Walden
5. Influence: English socialists, Gandhi, King, anarchists (19th and 20th century), environmentalists
6. The Anglo-American Thoreau and the Native American Thoreau: postcolonial awareness (between Briton and Indian with asides at Irish and Canadian immigrants)
7. Use of local history, folklore, anecdote, tradition, animal imagery
8. Deep puns, etymological foolery
9. Transformations of water: rain, snow, ponds, ice, melting, generation
10. Fact into truth: Nature as mirror: water, eye, sky
11. Cosmology: God as workman, scientist, artist; Creation then and continuous creation
12. Thoreau and English Romanticism: the Byronic self-engendered self, the Wordsworthian growth of the mind; Shelleyan poet as legislator (bard?)
13. A community without class, race, gender, sex, money, power, character?
14. Analogs from Quakers, Deists, Shakers, Swedenborgians, Fourierians
15. Thoreau's politics: the case of slavery, the abolitionists, and John Brown
16. Does Walden have a focus, form, climax, or center? Who or what is the implied reader or audience (public, cult, individual)?
17. Thoreau's use of Homer, Ovid, Eastern classics
18. Analogs: Edwards and spiritual autobiography, naturalist description (Bartram, Agasiz, Audubon), Paine's radical deism, conversation and sermon and lyceum and lecture
19. Thoreau and civil disobedience, civil rights, anarchism, violence
20. Nature and consciousness, matrix and text, observation and separate participation, other and self