Thoreau Work on East Coast Wildlife to Be Printed for First Time

A section of an unfinished project by Henry David Thoreau, called “Wild Fruits,” will soon be available for the first time, nearly 140 years after the author’s death.

Thoreau chose to follow “Walden,” his signature work, with a meditation on the “rich and fertile mystery” of the wildlife around Concord, Mass. “Prior to 1851, Thoreau was writing about himself in nature,” said the book’s editor, Bradley Dean. “With ‘Wild Fruits,’ he seems to be getting out of the way. He writes about nature itself.”

Dean also edited another portion of Thoreau’s project, “Faith in a Seed,” which was published a few years ago.

Because Thoreau has long been celebrated as one of the greatest American thinkers and prose stylists, it seems unthinkable that even fragments of Thoreau’s work took so long to be published. Dean painstakingly deciphered the scattered, handwritten pages to bring the book together.

Much of “Wild Fruits” is a catalog of Thoreau’s observations. Each plant or fruit has its own entry. He offers poetic descriptions of the elm tree (“we owe to it the first deepening of the shadows in our streets”), the dandelion (“that little seedy spherical system”) and the strawberry (“better call it by the Indian name of heart-berry, for it is indeed a crimson heart”).