Into The Wild by Jon Krakauer is based on a transcendentalist named Chris McCandless. Transcendentalism is defined as having an awareness of nature and yourself. Krakauer pulls similar themes from works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Michael Donovan. A common theme these four authors display is self-reliance. Self-Reliance is the act of recognizing your own thoughts and emotions In Emerson’s works Nature, Self-Reliance, and Concord hymn, he uses different environments for the characters to become aware of themselves. Thoreau’s works, Civil Disobedience and Walden, he relates a person’s thoughts to the thoughts and ideas of law and society. In Donovan’s poem “It’s All-On-Me”, he describes how someone can recognize them
