This is a study of Thoreau's participation in the economic discourse of his time, when New England and America underwent an unprecedented transformation in economic thinking and behaviour. The first part of the book examines Thoreau's responses to economic and cultural conditions as a literary artist, who identified his writing as his vocation. The second part, which uses Walden as an example, attempts to offer an answer to the question of why and how Thoreau, who was very much contained by his culture and its conventions, also contested the limitations of those conventions and used his condition to transform them.