A Fugitive in Walden Woods by Norman LockMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
This short novel is a sort of biography of Henry David Thoreau. Yet it’s told through the lens of a fictional runaway slave, the fugitive, Samuel Long. To escape he had to chop off his hand from his manacles, then made his way north settling in Concord for the duration of the book. Ralph Waldo Emerson gave Samuel a shack on his property to live in, and pays him to look after Thoreau and do odds and ends type jobs.
Weaved in this story are the philosophies and thoughts of the many transcendentalists and writers that were around Concord. We also get Samuel’s story as he relates it to William Lloyd Garrison for his newspaper The Liberator.
There is a lot of fact and history within these pages, but undoubtedly a lot of fiction as well. There isn’t really a plot, or anything moving the story forward except for time and events that follow one after another.
I enjoyed the book, as I did with the other two books of Lock’s American novels series I’ve read.
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