At his death, Henry Thoreau left the majority of his writing unpublished. The bulk of this material is a journal that he kept for twenty-four years. Sharon Cameron's major claim is that this private work (the Journal) was Thoreau's primary work, taking precedence over the books that he published in his lifetime. Her controversial thesis views Thoreau's Journal as a composition that confounds the distinction between public and private—the basis on which our conventional treatment of discourse depends.

Sharon Cameron is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English at the Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre and The Corporeal Self: Allegories of the Body in Hawthorne and Melville.