THOREAU, Henry David.

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A Yankee in Canada, With Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers. First edition of this posthumous anthology, including, most famously, "Civil Disobedience". "Through its impact on Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, the anti-Nazi movement in Europe in the 1940s, and anti-Vietnam War protesters in the 1970s, [the essay] has had a wider political influence than any other American literary document" (ANB). Four years after the author's death, his sister Sophia Thoreau and his friends Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Ellery Channing edited this work, which collects Thoreau's account of his excursion to Canada alongside his abolitionist and reformist papers. "Some of Thoreau's most brilliant and pungent sayings are to be found in [the Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers], of which the very best are the 'Plea for John Brown', the most impassioned of all his writings, and 'Life without Principle', which conveys in brief form the substance of his protest against the follies of modern society" (Salt, p. 271).The Thoreau family were deeply involved in the antislavery movement and provided their home as a station on the Underground Railroad for escaped slaves seeking freedom in Canada. Though under-appreciated during his lifetime, Thoreau's posthumous reputation has placed him among the major American writers and conservationists. This work, issued by the same publisher as his Walden (1854), saw 1,546 copies printed.

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