Video games
The National Endowment for the Arts in 2012 bestowed Tracy Fullerton, game designer and professor at the University of Southern California's Game Innovation Lab with a $40,000 grant to create, based on the book, a first person, open world video game called Walden, a game,[38] in which players "inhabit an open, three-dimensional game world which will simulate the geography and environment of Walden Woods".[39] The game production was also supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and was part of the Sundance New Frontier Story Lab in 2014. The game was released to critical acclaim on July 4, 2017, celebrating both the day that Thoreau went down to the pond to begin his experiment and the 200th anniversary of Thoreau's birth. It was nominated for the Off-Broadway Award for Best Indie Game at the New York Game Awards 2018.[40]
Digitization and scholarship efforts
Digital Thoreau,[41] a collaboration among the State University of New York at Geneseo, the Thoreau Society, and the Walden Woods Project, has developed a fluid text edition of Walden[42] across the different versions of the work to help readers trace the evolution of Thoreau's classic work across seven stages of revision from 1846 to 1854. Within any chapter of Walden, readers can compare up to seven manuscript versions with each other, with the Princeton University Press edition,[43] and consult critical notes drawn from Thoreau scholars, including Ronald Clapper's dissertation The Development of Walden: A Genetic Text[44] (1967) and Walter Harding's Walden: An Annotated Edition[45] (1995). Ultimately, the project will provide a space for readers to discuss Thoreau in the margins of his texts.
Influence
- The Dutch writer and psychiatrist Frederik van Eeden used the ideas from this book to create his own vision, back to the nature, at the commune Walden in the Netherlands in 1898.
- In the 1948 book Walden Two by behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner the experimental Walden Two Community is mentioned as having the benefits of living in a place like Thoreau's Walden, but "with company".
- Jonas Mekas' 1968 film Walden is loosely inspired by the book.
- Jean Craighead George's My Side of the Mountain trilogy (1959) draws heavily from themes expressed in Walden. Protagonist Sam Gribley is nicknamed "Thoreau" by an English teacher he befriends.
- Shane Carruth's second film Upstream Color (2013) features Walden as a central item of its story, and draws heavily on the themes expressed by Thoreau.
- In 1962, William Melvin Kelley titled his first novel, A Different Drummer, after a famous quote from Walden: "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer." The quote, as well as another stanza from the book, appears as an epigraph in Kelley's novel, which echoes Thoreau's theme of individualism.
- The name of the gay men's culture and news magazine Drum, which began publication in 1964, was inspired by the same quote, which appeared in every edition.[46]
- The 1989 film Dead Poets Society heavily features an excerpt from Walden as a motif in the plot.
- The Finnish symphonic metal band Nightwish paraphrased the quote "Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth" on their 2011 song "The Crow, the Owl and the Dove" from the studio album Imaginaerum. They also make several references to Walden on their eighth studio album Endless Forms Most Beautiful of 2015, including in the song titled "My Walden" and in the song "Alpenglow".
- The investment research firm Morningstar, Inc. was named for the last sentence in Walden by founder and CEO Joe Mansueto, and the "O" in the company's logo is shaped like a rising sun.
- In the 2015 video game Fallout 4, which takes place in Massachusetts, there exists a location called Walden Pond, where the player can listen to an automated tourist guide detail Thoreau's experience living in the wilderness. At the location there stands a small house which is said to be the same house Thoreau built and stayed in.
- Phoebe Bridgers references the book in her song "Smoke Signals".
- In 2018, MC Lars and Mega Ran released a song called "Walden" where they discuss the book and its influence.
- In the 1997 episode "Weight Gain 4000" of South Park, Eric Cartman "writes" a prize-winning essay copied from Walden, replacing Thoreau's name with his own.
- Professor Richard Primack from Boston University utilizes information from Thoreau's Walden in climate change research.[47]
- It is suggested that the genre of nature writing in American literature is derived from Thoreau's Walden.[48]
- In 2019 episode "Alone, I cannot be" of the first season of the television series Dickinson Emily Dickinson reads Walden and then travels to Henry David Thoreau's cabin to seek out his help in protesting againt a railroad construction.
- In 2021, episode two of the K-drama Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha, which tells the story of a big city dentist moving to a lesser known country town to start a clinic, references the following passage from Thoreau's Walden, "What I desire are the flowers and fruit of people", to emphasize the male protagonist's (the town's chiefs) outlook on life.
