Thoreau quit teaching after weeks rather than beat his pupils
Henry David Thoreau is remembered for Walden and for Civil Disobedience, the essay arguing that citizens may refuse an unjust state. That idea later shaped Tolstoy, Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. His own life shows the same stubborn streak, from a refused Harvard fee to a teaching job abandoned on principle.
He was born David Henry Thoreau in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1817, the son of a pencil maker. His maternal grandfather, Asa Dunbar, had headed a 1766 revolt at Harvard over butter, the earliest student protest on record in colonial America. Henry flipped his first and middle names after college but never changed them legally. Friends said the surname sounded like the word thorough, with the stress at the front; the now common second-syllable stress arose later, when foreign interest made people assume the name was not American.
At Harvard from 1833 to 1837 he studied rhetoric, classics, philosophy, mathematics and science. Legend holds that he declined to pay five dollars for a master's diploma, joking that every sheep should keep its own skin, a dig at sheepskin diplomas. Law, church, business and medicine held no appeal. Hired by Concord's public school after graduating, he resigned within weeks rather than administer corporal punishment.
In 1838 he and his brother John opened the Concord Academy, a grammar school with progressive habits such as nature walks and visits to local businesses. It closed in 1842 when John cut himself shaving, contracted tetanus and died in Henry's arms. None of the four Thoreau siblings married, and three, including Henry, died of tuberculosis.
His books, journals and poems fill more than 20 volumes. His natural history writing anticipated ecology and environmental history, and he urged stripping away waste and illusion to find what life truly requires. A lifelong abolitionist, he lectured against the fugitive slave law and defended John Brown. Some call him an anarchist; proto-anarchist may be the better label. He died in 1862, and his Concord birthplace on Virginia Road is now restored and open to visitors.
Source: Henry David Thoreau
