'If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.'

In 1845 Henry David Thoreau, one of the principal New England Transcendentalists, left the small town of Concord for the country. Beside the lake of Walden, he built himself a log cabin and returned to nature, to observe and reflect - while surviving on eight dollars a year.

From this experience emerged one of the great classics of American literature, a deeply personal reaction against the commercialism and materialism that Thoreau saw as the main impulses of mid-19th century America.