Thoreau

henry david thoreau was a good man

Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts on July 12,

1817 ("Thoreau" 96), on his grandmother's farm. Thoreau, who was of

French-Huguenot and Scottish-Quaker ancestry, was baptized as David Henry

Thoreau, but at the age of twenty he legally changed his name to Henry

David. Thoreau was raised with his older sister Helen, older brother John,

and younger sister Sophia (Derleth 1) in genteel poverty (The 1995 Grolier

Multimedia Encyclopedia 1). It quickly became evident that Thoreau was

interested in literature and writing. At a young age he began to show

interest writing, and he wrote his first essay, "The Seasons," at the

tender age of ten, while attending Concord Academy (Derleth 4).

In 1833, at the age of sixteen, Henry David was accepted to Harvard

University, but his parents could not afford the cost of tuition so his

sister, Helen, who had begun to teach, and his aunts offered to help. With

the assistance of his family and the beneficiary funds of Harvard he went

to Cambridge in August 1833 and entered Harvard on September first. "He

[Thoreau] stood close to the top of his class, but he went his own way too

much to reach the top" (5).

In December 1835, Thoreau decided to leave Harvard and attempt to

earn a living by teaching, but that only lasted about a month and a half

(8). He returned to college in the fall of 1836 and graduated on August 16,

1837 (12). Thoreau's years at Harvard University gave him one great gift,

an introduction to the world of books.

Upon his return from college, Thoreau's family found him to be less

likely to accept opinions as facts, more argumentative, and inordinately

prone to shock people with his own independent and unconventional opinions.

During this time he discovered his secret desire to be a poet (Derleth 14),

but most of all he wanted to live with freedom to think and act as he

wished.

Immediately after graduation from Harvard, Henry David applied for

a teaching position at the public school in Concord and was accepted.

However, he refused to flog children as punishment. He opted instead to

deliver moral lectures. This was looked down upon by the community, and a

committee was asked to review the situation. They decided that the

lectures were not ample punishment, so they ordered Thoreau to flog

recalcitrant students. With utter contempt he lined up six children after

school that day, flogged them, and handed in his resignation, because he

felt that physical punishment should have no part in education (Derleth 15).

In 1837 Henry David began to write his Journal (16). It started

out as a literary notebook, but later developed into a work of art. In it

Thoreau record his thoughts and discoveries about nature (The 1995 Grolier

Multimedia Encyclopedia 1).

Later that same year, his sister, Helen, introduced him to Lucy

Jackson Brown, who just happened to be Ralph Waldo Emerson's sister-in-law.

She read his Journal, and seeing many of the same thoughts as Emerson

himself had expressed, she told Emerson of Thoreau. Emerson asked that

Thoreau be brought to his home for a meeting, and they quickly became

friends (Derleth 18). On April 11, 1838, not long after their first meeting

Thoreau, with Emerson's help, delivered his first lecture, "Society" (21).

Ralph Waldo Emerson was probably the single most portentous person

in Henry David Thoreau's life. From 1841 to 1843 and again between 1847

and 1848 Thoreau lived as a member of Emerson's household, and during this

time he came to know Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, and many other

members of the "Transcendental Club" ("Thoreau" 696).

On August 31, 1839 Henry David and his elder brother, John, left

Concord on a boat trip down the Concord River, onto the Middlesex Canal,

into the Merrimack River and into the state of New Hampshire. Out of this