Thoreau, Henry D. Letters to a Spiritual Seeker, New York: WW Norton, 2004. 266 pp. Paper Back Ed. Edited by Bradley P. Dean In 1848, Harrison Blake of Worcester, MA, yearning for a spiritual life, asked the then-fledgling writer Henry David Thoreau for guidance. Over the next 13 years, Thoreau would send 50 letters to Blake, and in this book the late Bradley P. Dean has compiled and annotated all of them or the first time. The letters are by turns earnest, oracular, witty, playful, practical and deeply insightful and inspiring, as one would expect from America's best prose stylist and great moral philosopher. "These letters make an important American contribution to our thinking about spirit and religion. They are full of key corrections to the current tendency to slide toward rigid religionism or toward secularism. And they are brimming with wit, a rare joy for me to read these letters, so well presented and annotated, and I know they will instruct and inspire other readers." - Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul and Dark Nights of the Soul