With the publication of The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, Princeton University Press joins university presses throughout the United States which are cooperating in the major project, organized by the Center for Editions of American Authors and sponserred by the National Endowment for the Humanities, to make the work of major American writers available in authoritative texts. Despite the wide recognition of Thoreau's importance not only as an Ameraican writer but as a world writer, there has been no complete and authoritative edition of his writings until now The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, under the general editorship of William L. Howarth, provides for the scholar and the general reader authoritative texts, edited according to the most advanced bibliographical principles, and presented with textual notes. The collection contains the cllege essays, the 'Notes on Fruits and Seeds,' and a number of other previously unpublished pices. The Journal, for example, will be published as a complete and accurate transcription in unannotated text of what Thoreau first wrote in the manuscript notebooks-the material he intended to stand as the private record of his experiences-before he revised them weeks, months, even years later.
