When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only.1I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.2
Thoreau wrote the first draft of Walden at the pond, but continued to work on the book for several more years. Irish laborers for the Fitchburg Railroad lived in shanties that were closer than a mile, but Thoreau did not considered them neighbors, because they moved soon after after the completion of the railroad. ↩︎
E.B.White “borrowed” this from Thoreau, writing “At present I am a sojourner in the city again,” in his “A Report in Spring” essay. ↩︎