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Woodsburner

by John Pipkin

Cover of Woodsburner

On April 30, 1844, a year before he built his cabin on Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau accidentally started a forest fire that destroyed three hundred acres of the Concord woods--an event that altered the landscape of American thought in a single day. Against the backdrop of Thoreau's fire, Pipkin's ambitious debut penetrates the mind of the young philosopher while painting a panorama of the young nation at a formative moment.

Forest firesFictionFiction, biographicalMassachusetts, fiction