by Carolyn Sally Jones
The story of Henry David Thoreau's 'experiment in living'
with Peter Marinker as Thoreau

'Simplicity, simplicity. simplicity! Let your affairs be as two or three and not a hundred or a thousand: instead of a million count half-a-dozen and keep your accounts on your thumbnail.'

In 1845 Thoreau began his solitary 'experiment in living' in a cabin by Walden Pond in Massachusetts. He took to the woods hoping to prove that a self-sufficient life was still possible. Through 'Walden' - his account of the years by the pond - his ideas gained wide currency. But Thoreau himself is still an enigma: he had no worldly ambition; he never married: and an America obsessed with the railroad, the telegraph and progress looked on his exploits with growing incomprehension.