Walden
Thoreau spent two years in a cabin he built on woodland near Concord, Massachusetts, and wrote an account of what he spent, what he ate, what he read and what he heard. The famous opening chapter is an itemised budget. The point is not that everyone should move to the woods but that most expenses are choices.
The book is uneven by design: chapters on beans, ponds and winter alternate with passages of fairly severe moral argument. It is often quoted and less often read; the practical chapters are the reward.
Public-domain status
First published in 1854. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Henry David Thoreau died in 1862, so this work has been free to republish there since 1933.
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