Cape Cod

Henry David Thoreau took four walking tours of Cape Cod from 1849 to 1857. His masterpiece reveals what the American literary genius found 150 years ago to awaken to the rugged splendor of Cape Cod's beaches, villages, lighthouses and harbors. "Wishing to get a better view than I had yet of the ocean, which, we are told covers more than two-thirds of the globe, but of which a man who lives a few miles inland may never see any trace, more than another world, I made a visit to Cape Cod," Thoreau writes. He spent, in all, three weeks walking from Eastham to Provincetown on both the Atlantic and Bay sides. "Cape Cod" is about the people he met there who fished for cod, mackerel, lobster and oysters, salvaged from the sea after shipwrecks from savage gales and tended lighthouses. It's about the natural beauty he experienced by walking the beaches beneath magnificent sand bluffs and biding his leisure in Provincetown. A "Preface to Thoreau's Cape Cod" by David B. Lentz adds context, clarity and insight to this edition of the Classic Masterpiece Series by WordsworthGreenwich Press. To understand truly the natural beauty of The Cape, Thoreau's "Cape Cod" is inspired reading. No American writer has written, before or since Thoreau, a more enlightened account of such a lovely and wild American seacoast than in "Cape Cod."