Reveries of A Solitary Walker

Reveries of a Solitary Walker was first published in 1782, four years after the author’s death. The work was discovered in his notebooks, with only the final section of the work left unfinished. Rousseau composed the text between the autumn of 1776 and the spring of 1778; he was still working on it less than two months before his death. After a little over a year in England, during which his friendship with David Hume came to an abrupt and acrimonious end , Rousseau returned to France in the spring of 1767 where he was given refuge by a series of noblemen, including the Prince of Conti, who offered him shelter at his Chateau de Trie. Rousseau would spend the rest of his life moving between Lyon — where he performed his poem Pygmalion to great acclaim — and Paris, where he supported himself copying music and enjoying the French countryside, where he worked on his most famous autobiographical book, Confessions.