A novel as wise as it is tender, a meditation on the miracle of friendship and the heartbreak of change, Followed by the Lark inhabits the life of Henry David Thoreau. Composed in small scenes, Followed by the Lark is a novel of meditations--on loss, on change, on the danger and healing that come from communion with the natural world. Henry David Thoreau's connection to nature was tied to his feelings of grief; before he was twenty-seven years old and went to live at Walden Pond, two of those closest to him had died--his older brother, John, and his friend Charles Wheeler. Nature provided solace for these losses, but the world was changing around him. The forests were being destroyed by the logging industry. Wildlife was increasingly slaughtered for profit and sport. The railroad clanged through his quiet hometown. And the catastrophes of the American Civil War were beginning to stir just as his own life was coming to an end. Haunting in its quiet spaces, in the way it imagines the missed connections in his relationships, Followed by the Lark is uncommon in its combination of scope and brevity, in its communion with its subject while still maintaining critical distance. Thoreau's life in the early nineteenth century seems firmly in the past, but his time bears striking similarities to ours. As she explores these intersections in Followed by the Lark, Helen Humphreys elegantly, insistently illustrates how Thoreau's concerns are still, vitally, our own.
"A luscious novel . . . [Helen] Humphreys offers a fresh view of a philosopher thought of as a loner, depicting his family home as a place for communion and companionship . . . This is Thoreau as he really lived." --Hillary Kelly, The Atlantic

A novel as wise as it is tender, a meditation on the miracle of friendship and the heartbreak of change, Followed by the Lark inhabits the life of Henry David Thoreau.

Henry felt his pulse quickening with the lengthening days and the return of the birds, with the leafing out of the trees and the whir of the poplars, the trembling song of the frogs in the marsh. We mark time and make our mark on the earth, even as everything around us is shifting and growing, and soon enough these marks will disappear. Friendship comes and reorients us to the horizon; loss comes and stretches out into loneliness. Henry measured and recorded the temperature on and around Walden Pond across the seasons. He built a cabin on its banks and lived there mostly alone--for two ye