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Elizabeth Witherell (born August 15, 1948) is a literary historian and scholarly editor. Since 1980 she has been the editor-in-chief of The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, a long-term project that aims to provide, for the first time, accurate texts of the complete works of American author Henry David Thoreau.

Career
Witherell was appointed editor-in-chief of the Thoreau project in 1980, when it was a research project at Princeton University. Since 2005, she and the project are located at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) in 1983.

Under Witherell's direction, the Thoreau project has published 14 volumes with Princeton University Press
 * • A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1980)

• Journal, volumes 1-8 (1981-2002)

• Translations (1986)

• Cape Cod (1988)

• Excursions (2007)

• Correspondence, volumes 1-2 (2013-2018). The full list of the volumes published by the Thoreau project can be found at The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau. In addition to her role as editor-in-chief, Witherell served as a co-editor on A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Journal Vol. 1, and Correspondence Vol. 2.

Witherell also was the editor for Thoreau: Collected Essays and Poems, a volume in The Library of America's Thoreau series.

Witherell has collected a large amount of information about Thoreau's manuscripts, including their location, in the process of preparing the published volumes. In the Walter Harding lecture at the campus of SUNY Geneseo in 2016, Witherell used the manuscripts to illustrate how Thoreau approached not only his familiar love of Nature but also his close attention to the family's pencil business.

Honors and Service
Witherell served as President of the Thoreau Society from 1996-2000. The Society honored her with the Thoreau Society medal at their annual meeting in 2008. Witherell also delivered the keynote address at the annual meeting of the Thoreau Society in 2016.