Friends Like These: On Thoreau and Emerson

It was on Emerson’s land that Thoreau built his cabin at Walden Pond in 1845 and there lived for two years, honing his craft and writing the manuscript of his first book, the one that failed to sell, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849). There’s truth in this sketch, but Jeffrey S. Cramer’s new book, Solid Seasons: The Friendship of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, fills in, for the first time, the highlights, shadows, and fundamental imbalances that never quite ruined Thoreau and Emerson’s friendship, even as it brought both men great pain. You can almost see Cramer’s outline, each fact — Lidian Emerson’s 1837 note that her husband had recently taken a keen interest in Thoreau; Thoreau’s 1846 journal observation that Emerson was “not so adequate to his task”; Emerson’s recollection, in 1878, as his mind was slipping, that Thoreau was his best friend — you can almost watch as each fact and source is scaffolded in and sentences mortared out from them.

Source: lareviewofbooks.org