Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

by Kurt Andersen

Henry David Thoreau invented a certain kind of entitled, upper-middle-class extended adolescence. After college he hung around the nice Boston suburb where he’d grown up, taught some school, wrote the occasional essay, networked, became personal assistant and protégé to a famous local writer (Ralph Waldo Emerson), decided eating meat was bad, and on a camping trip with a local rich kid accidentally burned down three hundred acres of forest. Then, at twenty-seven, in 1844, he hatched a high-concept plan for a project that epitomized the pastoral fantasy that American suburbanites and hippies and country-home owners have reenacted ever since. On a wooded lot that Emerson owned, young Henry built a one-room cabin. He moved in on the Fourth of July—nice touch—and imagined he was an American hinterlander, rustic and self-reliant, fully communing with nature, pure and virtuous. Walden was the book of pensées he published chronicling his two years “in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself…and earned my living by the labor of my hands only….I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life….Instead of no path to the front-yard gate in the Great Snow—no gate—no front-yard—and no path to the civilized world.” In fact, his cabin, which his friends helped him build, was barely a half-hour walk from the prosperous old town where his mom and dad and a couple of thousand other people lived, and only a seventeen-mile trip on the new railroad from...