Stewardship Lectures 2007: Cramer

I to Myself: Thoreau in his Journal

with Jeffrey S. Cramer

The Stewardship Lecture Series 2007

October 11

Doors open at 7:00 p.m. for wine-and-cheese reception

Lecture begins promptly at 7:30 p.m.

At the Walden Woods Project's Thoreau Institute

44 Baker Farm, Lincoln, MA

For reservations, call 781-259-4707,

or reserve on-line.

It was his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, another inveterate journal keeper, who urged Thoreau to keep a record of his thoughts and observations. Begun in 1837, Thoreau’s journal spans a period of twenty-five years and runs to more than two million words, coming to a halt only in 1861, shortly before the author’s death. The handwritten journal had somewhat humble origins, but as it grew in scope and ambition it came to function as a record of Thoreau’s interior life as well as the source for his books and essays. Indeed, it became the central concern of the author’s literary life. Critics now recognize Thoreau’s journal as an important artistic achievement in its own right. Thoreau Institute Curator Jeffrey S. Cramer will talk about Thoreau in his Journal and about his new book, I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau (Yale University Press).

Making selections from the entirety of the journal, Cramer presents all aspects of Thoreau: writer, thinker, naturalist, social reformer, neighbor, friend. No other single-volume edition offers such a full picture of Thoreau’s life and work. Cramer’s annotations add to the reader’s enjoyment and understanding. He provides notes on the biographical, historical, and geographical contexts of Thoreau’s life. The relation between Journal passages and the texts of works published in the author’s lifetime receive special emphasis.

I to Myself, a companion to Cramer's Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition, is a welcome addition to any book lover’s library.

"A welcome and appealing work, whose chief strength lies in the range and detail
of the information provided in its annotations."
—David M. Robinson, author of Natural Life: Thoreau's Worldly Transcendentalism

“In editing and annotating this selection from the two-million-word journal of Thoreau, Cramer has aimed to provide general readers with a clean, reliable, intelligently chosen series of entries from the massive original. . . . He has admirably succeeded.”
—Wayne Franklin, University of Connecticut

Copies of I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau

will be available for purchase and signing at the event!

Jeffrey S. Cramer is Curator of Collections at the Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods, and is the editor of Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition, and the forthcoming, The Maine Woods: A Fully Annotated Edition, both from by Yale University Press, and Thoreau on Freedom: Attending to Man: Selected Writings of Henry David Thoreau (Fulcrum Press). Visit the author's website at: www.jeffreyscramer.com.

Photographer: Ben Barnhart