Recently I posted a review on Thoreau's Walden. Whenever Thoreau is mentioned you see something like the following:

Henry David Thoreau was born on July 12, 1817, in Concord, Massachusetts. He began writing nature poetry in the 1840s, with poet Ralph Waldo Emerson as a mentor and friend.

Yes, Emerson was a mentor to Thoreau. He lived with in walking distance of the remote Walden. In fact he owned the land that Thoreau built the cabin on. 

Jon Krakauer's book, "Into The Wild", didn't end well. Christopher McCandless died after 4 months on the remote wilderness of Alaska, and he paid a steep price for what he learned. It was Thoreau's writings about finding ones self through deliberate solitude that took Chris to the wilderness but perhaps Chris found a much tougher nature than Thoreau found.

"Into The Wild" is an older book but not as old as Walden. When I first read Krakauer's book, I thought of the very different outcome and circumstances between it and Walden.