In a passage about landscape and writing in her book American Bloomsbury, Susan Cheever describes Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. It was one of many ponds in that area created by the uneven melting of glacial ice centuries ago, she writes. It was surrounded by thick forests, and went from being a few feet deep at the shore line to 100 feet deep in the middle. It was beside this pond that Henry David Thoreau built his tiny house.

Thoreau was 28 years old. His brother had died, and the woman he loved had married another. He had also lost the prospect of both a teaching and a writing career. ” Now his work could begin,” writes Cheever.

“I went to the woods to live deliberately, so that I might front the essential facts of things, and might not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived,” Thoreau wrote.

More than 150 years later, we still count those lines as among the finest written by an American author. “Although no one in Concord … would realize it for decades,” Cheever wrote. “The shimmering surface of the kettle pond named Walden would be the mirror of Thoreau’s genius for generations to come.”