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Henry Stuart Hazlitt was born in Philadelphia, son of Stuart Clark Hazlitt and Bertha Zaunder Hazlitt. Stuart died at the age of 28, when Henry was a baby. This resulted in an early life of relative poverty. After his mother remarried he spent the rest of his childhood in Brooklyn, New York. Hazlitt became interested in philosophy and aspired to pursue a career in psychology and philosophy. He attended New York City College but had to drop out of university without finishing a degree in order to provide for his mother as his stepfather had passed away. Hazlitt proceeded to work odd jobs, never lasting with one employer for long. At the age of 20, when he finally got a job at the Wall Street Journal as a stenographer, he had already finished his first book, Thinking as a Science, which was published in 1915. In 1920, Hazlitt became financial editor of The New York Evening Mail. While at the Mail in 1922, his second book appeared, titled "The Way to Will Power". Hazlitt later served as literary editor at The New York Sun from 1925 to 1929 and as literary editor of the left-leaning journal, The Nation starting in 1930. As part of his duties at The Nation, Hazlitt edited a series of essays titled "A Practical Program for America". Hazlitt, as a free-market thinker, often found himself clashing with the rest of the editorial staff at The Nation. As The Nation was advocating for greater government involvement to combat the Great Depression, Hazlitt was advocating for the opposite. This resulted in a series of public debates with socialist Louis Fischer and the parting of ways between Hazlitt and The Nation in 1933.