Reimagining Thoreau synthesizes the interests of the intellectual and psychological biographer and the literary critic in a reconsideration of Thoreau's literary career. The aims of the book are, first, to situate Thoreau's aims and achievements as a writer within the context of his troubled relationship to the microcosm of antebellum Concord; second, 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 third, to overturn traditional views of Thoreau's "decline" by offering a new estimate of the post-Walden writing and its place within his development.