As the apostle of the simple life, and the advocate of "listening to a different drummer," Thoreau is the hero of many of today's younger generation.
Henry David Thoreau was born on 12 July 1817 in Concord, Massachusetts, eighteen miles northwest of Boston, the only member of the so-called "Concord School of Writers" to be a native of that town. Although both his paternal and maternal ancestors had once been prosperous, the family patrimony had dwindled away and, thanks to his father John Thoreau's financial ineptness, Thoreau himself was brought up in an atmosphere of genteel poverty. The family, with its four children--Helen (born 1812), John (born 1815), Henry, and Sophia (born 1819)--moved frequently from house to house (for a time living in nearby Chelmsford and in Boston), and the father from job to job, until in 1823 they returned to Concord and established a moderately successful pencil-making business. The children were educated in the Concord public schools and later, at their mother's insistence and at some financial sacrifice, in the more adequate and prestigious private Concord Academy. Henry, a shy and quiet youth, spent much time by himself wandering in the woods and fields of Concord, a proclivity encouraged by his mother, who often took the family on long walks to observe the wonders of nature.
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