"In his retreat to Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau became the first American to reject the life of the suburb. The suburb, of course, was Concord, a community less suburban in 1850 than it is now, but a community whose vitality even then depended in good measure on its proximity to Boston. In Concord, Thoreau observed med leading lives of quiet desperation; as an alternative to leading such a life, he went into the woods. 'Let me live where I will,' he wrote, 'on this side the city, on that the wilderness, and ever I am leaving the city more and more and withdrawing into the wilderness.'" (94) Thoreau marks out a second middle-ground, one between the suburb and the wilderness, and in effect marks out the furthest that the suburban mind will allow his Agrarian spirit to wander. The suburbanite admires this naturalism, but he finds it impractical (even Thoreau was in town more often than we acknowledge). Walden gives the suburb its 'outer-ring', a 'purer' form of nature than they experience, to be sure, but one which is still noticeably related to their own daily existence. In this way, the suburbanite never has to acknowledge how far from nature he really is.

(Donaldson, Scott. The Suburban Myth. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969. Print.)