Anyone who survived high school English remembers Henry David Thoreau, who, 175-odd years ago, went back to the land, building a rough cabin outside Concord, Massachusetts, away from better-kept neighbors. We remember him and his story because Walden, the book that grew from his life-simplifying experiment, is now hailed as a classic of American literature and is a staple of the curriculum, selling tens of thousands of copies each year.

Many readers view Thoreau as a pre-modern eccentric, a bookworm-ish Ichabod Crane with better hammering skills. He was more than all that: He was competent at putting two boards together, better at bringing tomatoes forth from his rustic garden, better still at putting words on paper: “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,” he wrote, famously, inspiring generations of readers.

But like so many fine writers of his era and ours, Thoreau had trouble getting publishers to bite. Thoreau’s first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, published in 1849, had failed, selling just 200 copies in four years. When the publisher shipped the unsold copies to him, Thoreau wrote, ruefully, “I have now a library of nearly 900 volumes over 700 of which I wrote myself.”

He also paid for them himself. As Thoreau took Walden through draft after draft, publishers offered much the same deal: pay for the printing, share the proceeds. He finally selected one, and in August 1854, Walden came out, 2,000 copies at $1 a pop. All 2,000 found buyers, though it took five years to do so. Thoreau professed not to mind, and when a royalty check for $51.60 arrived, he used it mostly to buy books—and books like the Rig-Veda and the Mahabharata, exotic and unknown in this country. When he died at age 44, eight years after Walden first appeared, his last words were “moose,” then “Indian.” The first was eminently local, but whether he meant an Indian of the nearby forests or one of the Upanishads is something we can only guess at.

For all the rigors he describes, Thoreau didn’t really have such a hard life at Walden. His days were full of reading, walking, writing, and thinking. His cabin was on land owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson and within earshot of the Emersons’ dinner bell, to which he often responded. My old friend Ann Zwinger, inspired by reading Walden to become the eminent naturalist and nature writer that she was, never tired of pointing out that Thoreau’s sojourn at Walden Pond was made easier by the fact that his mother did his laundry for him.

Even so, Walden continues to teach readers lessons about economy, simplicity, and a life lived on one’s own terms. He stands as an inspiration to writers, too, not just for his words, but for daring to take risks to see them into print—a patron saint of the counterculture, then, but also of indie authors everywhere.

Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor.