Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living

＂In this book, John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle illuminate an underexplored aspect of worked-over cultural icon Henry David Thoreau and what his thinking has to tell us about the way we work now. Henry at Work overturns the popular perception of Thoreau as a navel-gazing recluse, scornful of work and other mundanities. Just the opposite, they argue, Thoreau worked hard and thought intensely about work: why we do it, what we hope to gain from it, and what it does to us. They aim to show readers not only Thoreau the writer and philosopher, but also the lesser-known Thoreau: Thoreau the worker, economist, and even the efficiency expert＂--

John Kaag is the Donahue Professor of the Arts at UMass Lowell, external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and the author of Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life (Princeton), American Philosophy: A Love Story, and Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are. Jonathan van Belle is an independent scholar of philosophy and the author of Zenithism. Kaag and van Belle are the editors of the anthology Be Not Afraid of Life: In the Words of William James (Princeton).