“Ex Oriente Lux”: Thoreau's Ecstasies and the Hindu Texts

From the standpoint of marketing and sales, Henry David Thoreau's first major publishing venture, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, was something of a fiasco, a fact hardly mitigated by his famously stoic, as well as humorous, avowals of failure. When, four years after its first appearance, he finally acquiesced to his publisher's petitions to accept the seven hundred and six unsold copies piled in the warehouse, he noted wryly in his journal, “I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.” Besides the commercial disappointment, Thoreau must have found the book's critical reception somewhat disheartening also.