Scott Sandage begins his history of failure in America at the graveside of Henry David Thoreau, listening to the words of Thoreau’s eulogist, his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, who reads Thoreau as a symbol of failed ambition:

For Sandage, this moment marks the end of any alternative to the ambitious life, and hence it marks the birth of an American obsession with success that throws into sharp relief the subjective consequences of failure – what Sandage describes beautifully as “identity in the red.” More typically, Thoreau’s Walden (1854) has been viewed as a book that strives to liberate its readers from economic entrapment by creating a higher economics of the mind and spirit, or by expanding the culture’s language of success. Whether we read Thoreau as escaping or revealing the contradictions of capitalism, one point remains clear: Walden has become a crucial text for thinking about the relationship between literature and the economic imperatives of modern life.