Walden

The argument for living deliberately, and for the individual conscience against the pressure of the crowd. Thoreau went to the woods to find out what was essential and came back with a book that is part nature writing, part economics, part declaration of independence for the self. It pairs with Civil Disobedience as the inward and outward halves of one conviction: that a person must first know their own mind before they can rightly answer the state's demands on it.

The Concord writer who spent a night in jail for refusing a tax and turned it into the most influential American essay on conscience. Civil Disobedience argues that a person's first duty is to do right, and that an unjust law has no claim on a just man. Walden is the longer argument: that a life lived deliberately, apart from the rush, is itself a civic act. King carried him. Gandhi carried him. The jail cell outlasted the empire.