SOURCE: Johnson, Linck C. “‘Whose Law is Growth’: A Week and Thoreau's Early Literary Career.” In Thoreau's Complex Weave: The Writing of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, pp. 202‐47. Charlottesville, Va.: The University Press of Virginia, 1986.

In the following excerpt, Johnson relates the troubled ten‐year history of A Week, from the river trip to initial publication.

As the above chapters indicate, the writing of A Week charts Thoreau's literary and intellectual development from his years at Harvard to its publication in 1849. But he was not simply becoming a mature artist during this period. He was also becoming a man, a frequently painful process that also had a marked impact upon A Week. “The changes which break up at short intervals the prosperity of men, are advertisements of a nature whose law is growth,” Emerson observed in “Compensation,” an essay that offers interesting insights into his...