But if Thoreau’s first book is flawed, it is a flawed masterpiece. Indeed, as critics have begun to recognize, even if Walden had not been written, A Week would nonetheless stand as one of the seminal works of the American Renaissance.

—Linck C. Johnson, Thoreau’s Complex Weave: The Writing of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (University Press of Virginia, 1986)