Publisher's Synopsis
Henry David Thoreau is famous for the literary In the spirit of Rilke's Letters to a Young excellence of his political and nature writings. Poet, here are Thoreau's reflections on God But his friend Harrison Blake understood that the and spirituality. "true significance of [Thoreau's] life" was in fact spiritual, and he presciently asked the then-little-known Thoreau for guidance in finding a path of his own. The result was a regular exchange of letters for the remaining thirteen years of Thoreau's life, charting the evolution of his skills as a writer and thinker. The possibilities and limits of spirituality, the role of vocation in developing one's spiritual life, the importance of a direct relationship between the individual and GodThoreau discusses these and more in his letters to Blake. The fifty letters, assembled and annotated here for the first time in their own volume by Bradley P. Deanwho has made the editing of Thoreau's manuscripts his life's workare by turns earnest, oracular, witty, playful, practical, and deeply insightful and inspiring.
