Don't Know What To Do With Your Life? Neither Did Thoreau

By Maureen Corrigan

National Public Radio - February 17, 201411:00 AM

Every year, students come into my office and say, "I don't know what I want to do with my life." Of course, plenty of people in the world don't have the luxury of such cluelessness, but my students don't look like they're enjoying their privilege; they look scared and depressed, as though they've already failed some big test of character. They might find some comfort in Michael Sims' new biography of the young Henry David Thoreau called, simply, The Adventures of Henry Thoreau.
Thoreau's parents, who ran a boarding house and a pencil-making business, managed to scrape up the tuition to send him to Harvard University. When the 19-year-old Thoreau graduated in 1837, he landed a competitive teaching job in his hometown of Concord, Mass.; he quit that job after two weeks because he resented classroom interference by his principal. Throughout his 20s, this Harvard grad helped out in the family business and worked spasmodically as a tutor, caretaker and manure shoveler. He mostly lived at home — with the exception of that two-year stretch at Walden Pond — and he was known round Concord as "quirky."

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