SOURCE: "Five Ways of Looking at Walden," in The Massachusetts Review, Vol. IV, No. 1, Autumn, 1962, pp. 149-62.

In this excerpt, Harding reflects on the variety of reasons why readers enjoy Walden and considers five possible ways of reading it; as a nature book, as a practical guide, as satire, as philosophy, and as a model of good prose.

Although Walden was not exactly a roaring success when it was published in 1854—it took five years to sell out the first edition of only two thousand copies—it has become, in the century since, one of the all-time best sellers of American literature. It has been issued in more than one hundred and fifty different editions—with a number of these editions having sold more than half a million copies each. At this moment it is in print in at least twenty-four different editions in this country alone as...