Young people often went through periods of independence interspersed with periods of dependence.

(The buddy he crashed with, for the record, was Ralph Waldo Emerson.)Īnd his path was not atypical of the 19th century, at least for a white man in the United States. He may have floundered during young adulthood, but Henry David Thoreau turned out pretty okay. “ is a scholar & a poet & as full of buds of promise as a young apple tree,” his friend wrote, and eventually was proven right. Henry published his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, when he was 31 years old, after 12 years of changing jobs and bouncing back and forth between his parents’ home, living on his own, and crashing with a buddy, who believed in his potential. It took him a while to find his calling-he worked in his father’s pencil factory, as a door-to-door magazine salesman, took on other teaching and tutoring gigs, and even spent a brief stint shoveling manure before finding some success with his true passion: writing. It would probably be fair to call Henry “aimless.” After he graduated from Harvard, he moved back in with his parents, a boomerang kid straight out of a trend piece about the travails of young adults.ĭespite graduating into a recession, Henry managed to land a teaching job, but two weeks in, he decided it wasn’t for him and quit.

Animated image of adulting