He Was A Boy Genius

Most of us spend our 14th year in junior high, worried constantly about getting older. However, Emerson was different. He was a boy genius. One of the interesting facts about Ralph Waldo Emerson is he started his formal education in 1812 at the age of nine at the Boston Latin School, which is currently the oldest school in the United States. In October 1817, Emerson enrolled in Harvard Divinity College. He was the youngest student in his Harvard class at the age of just 14 since his teachers supported him and noticed his brilliant mind before he joined the university. He majored in Latin, Greek, geometry, physics, history, and philosophy while attending Harvard.

Emerson, who entered Harvard College in October 1817 at the age of 14, was given the responsibility of serving as the president's freshman messenger, which required him to pick up misbehaving pupils and communicate with teachers. Midway through his junior year, Emerson started a journal in a set of notebooks he would later name “Wide World” and started maintaining a list of the books he had read. For extra money to pay for school, he worked as a server at the Junior Commons and on occasion as a teacher in Waltham, Massachusetts, alongside his uncle Samuel and aunt Sarah Ripley. Emerson made the decision to use his middle name, Waldo, by his senior year. A month before his official graduation on August 29, 1821, when he was 18 years old, Emerson served as the class poet and, as was customary, read an original poem on Harvard's Class Day. Emerson worked as a teacher at the School for Young Ladies in the early 1820s (which was run by his brother William). The following two years were spent by him writing and studying nature in a cottage in Roxbury, Massachusetts' Canterbury neighborhood. In Franklin Park in Boston, this area is now known as Schoolmaster Hill in his honor.