At his death, Henry Thoreau left the majority of his writing unpublished.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.