Henry David Thoreau was born on July 12, 1817, of rather ordinary parents in Concord, outside of Boston, Massachusetts. His childhood and adolescence, from what little is known about these periods of his life, appear to have been typical for the time. Thoreau attended the Concord Academy as an undistinguished student, and when he was sixteen, his father, a pencil manufacturer, had saved enough money to send him to Harvard. There he read a great deal and thus philosophically and literarily prepared himself to become a spokesman for the transcendentalist movement; again, however, his career as a student was unspectacular.
When Thoreau graduated from Harvard in 1837, he had been educated for four possible professions: law, the clergy, business, or teaching. He was really interested in none of these professions for which he had been prepared, but he tried teaching for a short while. He was given a position in Concord, but soon resigned when he discovered that he was expected to teach by conscientiously beating the ABC's into his students with a rod. He decided that he would rather make pencils with his father and do some occasional surveying. (The latter activity would later come to be one of the main bread-and-butter occupations of his life.) Needless to say, the townspeople were surprised that a Harvard man should turn out so disappointingly. This was to be the first of many ways in which Thoreau would rebel against society's expectations for him.
