Harvard from a professor of rhetoric and oratory named Edward Tyrrel Channing. Channing, who taught a number of outstanding writers, assigned topics for his classes. Some of Channing's topics clearly influenced Thoreau's later work as a writer: for example, he wrote a class essay about "the duty, inconvenience and dangers of conformity, in little things and great." (Early Essays, 105) Seventeen years later, in Walden, he wrote: "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because…
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