Reimagining Thoreau synthesises the interests of the intellectual and psychological biographer and the literary critic in a reconsideration of Thoreau's career from his graduation from Harvard in 1837 to his death in 1862. The purposes of the book are threefold: to situate Thoreau's aims and achievements as a writer within the context of his troubled relationship to a microcosm of ante-bellum Concord; to reinterpret Walden as a temporally layered text in light of the successive drafts of the book and the evidence of Thoreau's journals and contemporaneous writings; and, to overturn traditional views of Thoreau's 'decline' by offering a new estimate of the post-Walden writing and its place within Thoreau's development.