Wild Fruits: Thoreau's Rediscovered Last Manuscript
Henry David Thoreau was 44 years old when he died of tuberculosis in the early spring of 1862. He had acquired a measure of notoriety in his lifetime largely for his fervent support of abolitionism and his refusal to pay taxes to support the American war of conquest against Mexico, the subject of his widely circulated pamphlet Civil Disobedience. Closer to his hometown of Concord, Massachusetts, he was known as something of an eccentric who kept a home in the woods and took long walks when the citizens of the town were at work or church.
We scarcely know Thoreau better, writes archivist and scholar Bradley Dean: we still remember him today for having spent time in jail and spinning philosophy out of the New England woods. On the strength of this lost, and now published, final manuscript of Thoreau's, Dean would have us think of him as a protoecologist, and for very good reason. In the last years of his life, Thoreau resolved to learn better the science behind nature, and in Wild Fruits he collected the lore and facts surrounding the plants around his home, observing such things as the quantity of chestnuts that local trees were producing, the myriad shapes of pine cones as they unfold, the taste of "fever bush," and the smell of sweet gale.
The unfinished manuscript, cataloging dozens of species, affords a fascinating glimpse into Thoreau's method as an amateur student of nature--a method worthy of close study and imitation. Dean adds greatly to it with his intelligent commentary, which revisits Thoreau's sources, corrects a few of his errors, and emphasizes the writer's importance to natural history and belles-lettres alike. --Gregory McNamee
The distinctly American gospel--never before published--of our great nature writer, mystic, ecologist, and prophet. "Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present . . . . There is something suggested by [the cockcrow] not in Plato nor the New Testament. It is a newer testament--the Gospel according to this moment," Henry David Thoreau wrote in "a sort of introduction" to Wild Fruits--his last manuscript and his transcendental gospel of the sacredness of nature. The difficulties of his handwriting, method of composition, notations, and pagination have kept his final observations and meditations from publication until now; thanks to the assiduous efforts of Thoreau specialist Bradley Dean, this great work can finally be brought to light. Wild Fruits is beautifully illustrated throughout with line drawings of the "wild fruits" Thoreau considers, as he writes, for example, "Famous fruits imported from the East or South . . . do not concern me so much as many an unnoticed wild berry whose beauty annually lends a new charm to some wild walk . . ." This work may be considered Thoreau's last will and testament, in which he protests our desecration of the landscape and envisions a new American scripture. As Dean writes, "the Thoreau New Testament suggests that the Holy Land is under our feet, as well as over our heads."
