He was frequently reprimanded, disciplined, even incarcerated, and could hardly await vacation time to return to his beloved mother, who in 1875 took over an inn at Lake Chiemsee.
Though Thoma was not enthusiastic about school, he devoured literature on his own. He discovered Dickens, read the German classics, liked the realists, and favored Theodor Fontane and especially the Swiss writer Gottfried Keller, whose humor and tales about country folk were to serve as a yardstick for his own literary endeavors. When he finished his trying school years, which would supply him with hilarious episodes for his best-known work, Lausbubengeschichten (Little Rascal Stories, 1905), he intended to become, like his father, a forestry official. Yet after two semesters at the Forstakademie in Aschaffenburg he found that he was more interested in people than in forest administration. He studied law in Munich and then in Erlangen, obtaining his doctorate in 1890.
After brief periods of legal apprenticeship in Traunstein and in Munich, Thoma, shortly after his mother's death in 1894, settled as a lawyer in Dachau, near Munich. Although his eloquence served his clients well, he soon grew to dislike the legal profession. But his keen observation of people in adverse situations would amply supply him with subject matter for his writing.
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