The Most American American: A Study of Freedom in American Arcadia

One of the American myths, currently obsolete and mostly forgotten, is a vision of America as an Arcadia where the perennial human dream of personal freedom could come true thanks to the idealistic concept of life which is supposedly possible in the pre-industrial, pre-corporation and nonovercrowded society in the context of unspoiled, wild nature. Such vision had a powerful personal and intellectual impact on a famous 19th-century American writer, Henry David Thoreau. The author of the article thoroughly analyses this myth of the American Arcadia on the basis of all major publications of the writer, in particular, the essays Walking and Civil Disobedience, as well as the book Walden.