SOURCE: Johnson, Paul David. “Thoreau's Redemptive Week.” American Literature 49, no. 1 (March 1977): 22‐33.

In the following essay, Johnson contends that the quest for self‐liberation is central to A Week, a quest advanced through the cyclical representation of time.

We have forgotten that much of the “private business” which Thoreau transacted at Walden was the writing of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and have lost sight of the intimate connections between Thoreau's writing of A Week and the activities at Walden which gave birth to his second, more famous book. His program for living a wholly natural life by purifying his spirit of the clutter of cultural arrangements until—like the surface of Walden pond—it trembled responsively with the heavens and expanded and contracted with the rhythm of the seasons is fully anticipated in the journey of A Week. Further, so carefully did he construct his...