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The texts of Walden and "Resistance to Civil Government" presented in this Norton Critical Edition are based on the first editions of those works.

The editor has incorporated all of Thoreauís additions to Walden, and these and all other emendations are summarized in a table of textual variants. Throughout, annotations have been revised and expanded.

The Second Edition also includes a much-expanded selection from Thoreauís Journal, most of it reprinted by special arrangement with Princeton University Press from the definitive edition of his writings.

Drawing on recently available material written during Thoreauís two-year stay at Walden Pond and accompanied by the editorís essay on "The Journal and Walden," these selections represent and illuminate the entire 1845-54 period during which Thoreau wrote, rethought, and extensively revised Walden.

Contemporary Reviews includes two notices of "Resistance to Civil Government" and three reviews of Wal-den that have come to light in recent years, among them one by Elizabeth Barstow Stoddard and another attributed to Lydia Maria Child.

Criticism has been refocused on modern critical analyses written between 1941 and 1991 in order to represent influential essays from the 1940s and 1950s, as well as the diversity of recent commentary on Tho-reauís two celebrated works.

Landmark essays by F. O. Matthiessen, Richard Drinnon, E. B. White, and Sherman Paul have been retained from the First Edition, while important and theoretically varied essays by Leo Marx, Stanley Cavell, Walter Benn Michaels, Barry Wood, Barbara Johnson, Robert Sattelmeyer, H. Daniel Peck, and Lawrence Buell have been added.

A Selected Bibliography is also included.