  Lessing published his Laocoön at the midpoint of his varied literary and intellectual career. Lessing, like Mendelssohn born in 1729, was the oldest of thirteen children of a Saxon pastor, and at twelve he entered the monastic school at Meissen; at seventeen he went to Leipzig to study theology, then changed to medicine, and then to the university at Wittenberg. But at twenty, he left the university and went to Berlin to make a career as a writer. There he quickly met among others Voltaire, at that time employed by Frederick the Great, as well as Mendelssohn. In 1755, Lessing had his great success with the bourgeois tragedy Miss Sara Sampson, which initiated a new direction in the German theater. In 1758, he started collaborating with Mendelssohn and Friedrich Nicolai on the Letters concerning the newest literature. From 1760 to 1765 Lessing worked as secretary to the governor of Silesia in Breslau, during which time he wrote Laocoön as well as the comedy Minna von Barnhelm. He returned to Berlin again in 1765, but, disappointed in his hopes for the position of Royal Librarian, went to Hamburg in 1767 as director of the National Theater. The program notes he wrote in that capacity became his Hamburg Dramaturgy, his most extended critical work. In 1770 Lessing finally found a secure post as librarian for the great collection of the Dukes of Brunswick in Wolffenbüttel, where he remained until his death in 1781. There he wrote the tragedy Emilia Galotti and his famous plea for religious tolerance in the form of Nathan the Wise, a play inspired by Mendelssohn. In addition to various theological polemics, he also published his Education of the Human Race the year before his death.