When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, or the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again. Thoreau started writing Walden in 1846, a few months after he started living at Walden Pond. He moved back to Concord late in 1847. By that point he had drafted half of the manuscript. He continued to work on it for several years.