A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849) is a book by American writer Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862).

The actual trip took two weeks and while given passages are a literal description of the journey — down the Concord River to the Middlesex Canal, to the Merrimack River, and back — much of the text is in the form of digressions by the Harvard-educated author on diverse topics such as religion, poetry, and history.

On July 4, 1845, Henry David Thoreau moved to a small home he assembled at Walden Pond and lived there for two years, two months, and two days.

[3] A slightly revised version of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, based on corrections Thoreau had made himself, was published in 1868, six years after his death.

[7][8] The French composer Robert Piéchaud (born 1969) wrote The River (2016), a wind quintet which freely follows Thoreau's work.