Walden
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50 free Walden trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Henry David Thoreau walked out of Concord in 1845, built a one-room house beside a pond, and stayed for a little over two years. The book he made of it is part memoir, part account ledger, part sermon and part field notebook, which is why readers still argue over it and classes still read it. This quiz follows the book chapter by chapter. Economy gets the most attention, as it does in most courses, followed by Where I Lived, and What I Lived For, The Village, The Ponds, Higher Laws, Brute Neighbors, Former Inhabitants and Winter Visitors, The Pond in Winter, Spring and the Conclusion. A few questions cover the people and events around the book. It is written for students revising a reading selection, for book clubs, and for anyone who remembers a famous line and wants to see how much of the rest has stayed with them. Every answer comes with a short explanation drawn from Thoreau's own pages.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In the Brute Neighbors chapter of Walden, which creatures fight a woodpile battle that Thoreau compares to Austerlitz?
Ants
Ants of two kinds, small red ones and larger black ones, covered the chips in his yard with their dead and dying. Thoreau carried three fighters indoors on a chip and watched them under a tumbler.
Q 02In The Village chapter of Walden, why does Thoreau say he was seized and put into jail one afternoon?
Not paying a tax
Not paying a tax got him locked up, because he would not recognize a state that bought and sold people. He was released the next day and was back in the woods in time for a dinner of huckleberries.
Q 03Which friend and mentor owned the woodland beside Walden Pond where Thoreau built his cabin and ran his experiment?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson let his younger friend build there in return for clearing part of the woodlot and doing other chores. He was 14 years older and had drawn Thoreau into Concord's circle of writers.
Q 04In the Higher Laws chapter of Walden, which animal crossing his path was Thoreau strongly tempted to seize and eat raw?
A woodchuck
A woodchuck stealing across the dark trail gave Thoreau what he called a strange thrill of savage delight. He was not hungry, he wrote, except for the wildness the animal stood for.
Q 05On which American holiday in 1845 did Thoreau, by his own account in Walden, first sleep in his unfinished cabin?
Independence Day
Independence Day was the date by accident, he says. The house was then only a defence against rain, with no plaster and with wide chinks between its rough, weather-stained boards.
Q 06In Walden, what did a hundred laborers come daily from Cambridge to harvest at the pond?
Ice
Ice from Walden was stacked in a heap Thoreau put at ten thousand tons and covered with hay and boards. Part of it was never carted off, and it did not finish melting until September 1848.
Q 07In Where I Lived, and What I Lived For in Walden, Thoreau says he went to the woods to live how?
Deliberately
Deliberately was his word for facing only the essential facts of existence. He feared reaching his deathbed and discovering that he had never really been alive.
Q 08In the Conclusion of Walden, a man who does not keep pace with his companions is said to hear a different what?
Drummer
Drummer is the word, and Thoreau's advice is to let the man step to the music he hears, however measured or far away. William Melvin Kelley borrowed the phrase for the title of his first novel in 1962.
Q 09Which Robin Williams film heavily features an excerpt from Thoreau's Walden as a motif in its plot?
Dead Poets Society
Dead Poets Society is one of several films to borrow from the book. In All That Heaven Allows, from 1955, Jane Wyman's character reads lines from it aloud.
Q 10What disaster did Thoreau and a friend accidentally cause near Walden Pond in 1844, a year before he moved there?
A forest fire
A forest fire set by Thoreau and Edward Hoar burned some 300 acres that April. He began building his cabin by the pond the following spring.
Q 11According to the Economy chapter of Walden, the mass of men lead lives of quiet what?
Desperation
Desperation, he argues, hides even under what people call their games and amusements. What passes for resignation, Thoreau adds, is only the same despair confirmed.
Q 12Thoreau's Economy chapter in Walden names four necessaries of life in a New England climate; which is one of them?
Fuel
Fuel makes the list because, he reasons, the grand necessity for our bodies is simply to keep warm. Most luxuries beyond the four he calls positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.
Q 13In Walden, which borrowed implement did Thoreau carry to the pond in March 1845 and return sharper than he received it?
An axe
Q 21In Walden, Thoreau says he wanted to live deep and Spartan-like and suck out all the what of life?
Marrow
Marrow was his image for whatever is left when existence is driven into a corner and reduced to its lowest terms. If it proved mean, he promised to publish its meanness to the world.
Q 22Which single word does Thoreau repeat three times as an exclamation in Walden, urging readers to keep their affairs few?
Simplicity
Simplicity is the cry, followed by the advice to keep your accounts on a thumbnail. Let your affairs be as two or three, he says, and not a hundred or a thousand.
Q 23In Walden, which farm did Thoreau nearly buy before the owner's wife changed her mind and wished to keep it?
The Hollowell place
An axe was all he had when he began felling tall white pines for the frame of his house. Its owner told him how dearly he prized it as he released his hold.
Q 14In Walden's Economy chapter, which bread ingredient did Thoreau give up for good after accidentally scalding his supply?
Yeast
Yeast turned out not to be indispensable, though housewives assured him that wholesome bread could not be made without it. He went on baking loaves of rye and Indian meal.
Q 15In Walden's Economy chapter, what six-foot railroad object does Thoreau say a hard-pressed man could buy and live in?
A tool box
A tool box where the laborers locked up their gear at night could be had for a dollar, he reckoned. Bore a few auger holes for air, hook down the lid, and a man would owe nobody rent.
Q 16Which crop did Thoreau plant in rows adding up to seven miles, as he describes in Walden, to earn a little money?
Beans
Beans filled most of his two and a half acres, and he hoed them barefoot until the sun blistered his feet. He did not care to eat them himself and exchanged the harvest for rice.
Q 17In Walden's Economy chapter, Thoreau warns readers to beware of all enterprises that require new what?
Clothes
Clothes matter too much, he complains: people are more anxious to look fashionable than to have a sound conscience. What such ventures really need, he adds, is a new wearer.
Q 18In Walden's Economy chapter, what did Thoreau buy from the laborer James Collins to get boards for his cabin?
A shanty
A shanty cost him four dollars and twenty-five cents, paid the night before the Collins family moved out. While he carted the boards away, a neighbor quietly pocketed the best of the nails.
Q 19In Walden, which item of furniture did Thoreau keep exactly three of, one for solitude and two for friendship?
Chairs
Chairs were so scarce that larger groups shared the third and mostly stood up. He still claimed to have had twenty-five or thirty people under his roof at once.
Q 20In the accounts of Walden's Economy chapter, which skilled work in the village earned Thoreau money besides carpentry?
Surveying
Surveying, carpentry and other day labor in the village brought in $13.34, and he boasted of having as many trades as fingers. He later measured and mapped the pond itself.
The Hollowell place was almost his when the owner offered ten dollars to be let off the bargain. Thoreau handed back the land and waved away the money, counting himself rich enough with his seeds and a dime.
Q 24In the Visitors chapter of Walden, what is the trade of the cheerful Canadian whom Thoreau admires but never names?
A woodchopper
A woodchopper so contented puzzled Thoreau, who could not tell whether the man was as wise as Shakespeare or as simply ignorant as a child. His real name was Alek Therien.
Q 25In The Village chapter of Walden, what errand had taken Thoreau into Concord on the afternoon he was arrested?
Fetching a shoe
Fetching a shoe from the cobbler was his only business in town that day. He collected it, mended, on his release the next day and went straight back to the woods.
Q 26Thoreau writes in Walden that he never locked his door; what was the only thing ever taken from the cabin?
A volume of Homer
A volume of Homer went missing, perhaps, he joked, because it was improperly gilded. He left the door unfastened even when he spent a fortnight away in Maine.
Q 27The night in jail that Thoreau mentions in Walden became the subject of which famous essay of his?
Civil Disobedience
Civil Disobedience began as lectures at the Concord Lyceum in 1848 and was first printed as Resistance to Civil Government. Its argument later influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.
Q 28In The Ponds chapter of Walden, Thoreau calls a lake the landscape's most expressive feature and names it earth's what?
Eye
Eye is his word, and he pushes the image further: the trees along the shore are the slender lashes that fringe it. The wooded hills and cliffs around are its overhanging brows.
Q 29In the Higher Laws chapter of Walden, what does Thoreau say he sold before he went to live in the woods?
His gun
His gun went because he had come to feel differently about fowling. His old excuse for carrying one was the study of rare birds, and he decided there was a finer way to study them than shooting.
Q 30In the Higher Laws chapter of Walden, which virtue does Thoreau call the flowering of man, with genius among its fruits?
Chastity
Chastity ripens into heroism and holiness as well, he writes. Yet a few lines later he confesses that we have heard of this virtue but do not know what it is.