Laurence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995, £27.95). Pp. 586. ISBN 0 674 25861 4.

In an MLA survey conducted in 1991 American professors proclaimed Walden the single most important work to teach in the country's nineteenth-century literature. Walden got 45% of the vote, as against 34% for The Scarlet Letter and 29% for Moby Dick. And, as Professor Buell reminds the readers of this wide-ranging, scholarly, and beautifully written book, Walden has always had a popular readership to match its early incorporation into the canon of American classics as studied in schools and universities. And there is hardly an American special-interest group – from nudists and whole-earthers, through civil-rights marchers, John-Birchers and survivalist cults – that has not claimed Thoreau at one time or another as its patron saint. The Unabomber is said to have been a particularly avid reader. Above all, it has been an inspiration to ecologists and environmentalists, starting with the pioneer of conservation legislation, John Muir.