"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." Thus Thoreau begins his account of the two years and two months he spent in a cabin he erected near Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, beginning in 1845. The book is not a traditional autobiography, but combines autobiography with a social critique of contemporary Western culture’s consumerist and materialist attitudes and its distance from and destruction of nature.