Henry David Thoreau

Letters to a Spiritual Seeker

In the spirit of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, here are Thoreau's reflections on God and spirituality.

Henry David Thoreau is famous for the literary excellence of his political and nature writings. But his friend Harrison Blake understood that the "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 God—Thoreau 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. Dean—who has made the editing of Thoreau's manuscripts his life's work—are by turns earnest, oracular, witty, playful, practical, and deeply insightful and inspiring.