Westward I Go Free ─ Tracing Thoreau's Last Journey

While Henry David Thoreau’s travels to the Maine Woods and Cape Cod were well documented and have been followed by “Thoreauvians” for decades, his 1861 “journey west” with Horace Mann, Jr.—which took the duo from Massachusetts to Minnesota and back—was left to be veiled in mystery. This book details this, the last, longest, and least-known of Thoreau’s excursions. The story of two 19th-century men and the 21st-century woman who was determined to follow their 4,000-mile path, this account will intrigue history buffs as they follow in the footsteps of a popular American writer and naturalist.

Corinne Hosfeld Smith is a librarian with more than 30 years of experience who serves on the staff of the Mondor-Eagen Library at Anna Maria College. She lives in Athol, Massachusetts. Laura Dassow Walls is the William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Emerson's Life in Science, The Passage to Cosmos, and Seeing New Worlds and the coeditor of The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism.