After that, Thoreau relied on his practical talent to support himself. He looked for another teaching job unsuccessfully, and in 1838 started his own school in Concord in 1839 his older brother John joined him and they operated the Concord Academy together until April 1841, when John became ill with tuberculosis and the school had to close. Irritated at this interference, Thoreau selected several students at random, whipped them, and resigned (he was making a point, but understandably some of the students he treated so unfairly never forgave him). When a member of the school board visited Thoreau’s classroom and found it too noisy, he told Thoreau to maintain stricter discipline. After he graduated in August 1837, Thoreau taught for a time: his first job was a well paying one as a teacher at the district school in Concord.

In Thoreau’s day, Harvard graduates usually became teachers or ministers - Harvard was established as a Puritan institution, and was a Unitarian school when Thoreau attended in the 1830s - instead of doctors and lawyers. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” Some of Channing’s topics clearly influenced Thoreau’s later work as a writer: for example, he wrote a class essay about “the duty, inconvenience and dangers of conformity, in little things and great.” Seventeen years later, in Walden, he wrote: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.

Channing, who taught a number of outstanding writers, assigned topics for his classes. Thoreau took these classes at Harvard from a professor of rhetoric and oratory named Edward Tyrrel Channing. Apart from an early essay about the seasons that may not be authentic, Thoreau’s first surviving compositions are those he wrote for college classes in English that included composition, logic, and public speaking. Thoreau never mentions when he knew that he would be a writer, but he probably decided sometime during college that he wanted writing to be his life’s work. In his writings, Thoreau also described situations and asked questions about human values that are universal. Even though Thoreau was born over 175 years ago, the questions he raised-about the meaning of nature, about the need for wildness as a tonic for the spirit, about individual rights and responsibilities - are still central issues in American life. Thoreauĭuring his lifetime, Henry Thoreau wrote and wrote and wrote - essays, books, poems, translations, letters, Journal entries - and what he wrote has become an important part of our heritage as Americans. The Thoreau Log: A Digital Documentary Life of Henry D.

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